


After

by singtome



Category: The Maze Runner (Movies), The Maze Runner Series - James Dashner
Genre: Canon-Typical Violence, First Time, Fluff, Getting Back Together, M/M, Mild Horror, Slow Burn, Smut
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-03-16
Updated: 2016-03-16
Packaged: 2018-05-27 01:43:15
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 49,288
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6264616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/singtome/pseuds/singtome
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>They don’t know how to live without looking over their shoulders. They go to sleep at night staring up at the stars, and hoping they will come back tomorrow.</p><p>(Or: The first year in Paradise is bad for some and worse for others.)</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> A few things:  
> First, this was never meant to be this long. At all. And yet here we are at 50k. My God what is wrong with me. Second, a lot of this - if not all of this - follows book!canon. I can't remember if I made any connections to movie!canon. Maybe I did, but only a little, for narrative purposes.  
> Third, spoilers for the ENTIRE series. All of this is just my version of what happens after the credits roll and a big The End pops up. Also one or two OCs. Those are things.  
> Finally, this is technically a one-shot, broken up just for the ease of reading it. 
> 
> Unbetaed. 
> 
> Anyway that's all, I guess. Enjoy :)

 

 

 _"I'm burning bridges like bomb hits, baby,_  
_I'm in no mood to try anymore."  
- 'Bridges', Boy  & Bear_

 

 

Gally wakes to cold morning light shining through his bedroom window.  He groans, kneading at his eyes, the kink in his neck just enough to be irritating but not painful. Under him the cheap cotton of the bed sheets are clumped, leaving trail marks down his cheeks and neck. He lazily toes at the pillows. What time is it? The only working clock is out in the living room – the minute hand broken, but otherwise, it serves its purpose.  Originally it had leant up against the side table of his bedroom, but the constant ticking drove him insane, and he barely gets sleep as it is.

Buying a few extra moments in the sleepy silence of what-ever-time-of-the-morning it is, and sighing in contentment, because – and some higher deity must exist and for whatever reason decided to use its almighty powers for his benefit – that god damn bird isn’t singing at the top of its lungs for the first time since, well. Ever. Or at least, since Gally moved into the house.

 _Someone needs to tell it that it’s constant shucking chirping isn’t pretty_ or _soothing_. He thinks, and  _Maybe Ira finally managed to nail it_ follows, vaguely hopeful.

Heavy limbs swing off the bed as Gally attempts to drag his body to the kitchen, bones lethargic, remembering to slip the small knife in its usual place under the mattress. The kitchen is dark and bleak, like the rest of the place, with the faint scent of damp. He remembers it rained last night, the first time in three weeks. Rain is scarce here, so much so that there’s a big hustle and bustle when it actually happens. Buckets, jugs, mugs and bottles are clumped into the centre of the village to catch whatever extra water they can get. Farmers sing in relief. Children run, dance and laugh while running to and fro cabins, muddying up their clothing until doting parents tell them to be careful.

Gally would have normally watched the spectacle from the comfort of, well, not  _his_  porch – from the comfort of someone’s porch. However, Frypan decided that he could be “useful for once” and made him haul the full buckets of water inside, yelling to run back to replace them right away, fingers snapping and shouting in urgency. Great friend.

The fridge is empty. Figures. There is a box of cereal up in one of the cupboards, but when Gally pulls it down it is lighter than air, the bag crumpled into a ball at the bottom. Gally curses Ira’s name under his breath and slams the door – there’s a faint hairline crack in the wood and he scans his memory to recall how long that’s been there – and peeks around the corner to spy at the clock in the living room.

It is nine-something in the morning. Maybe he can get away with not eating until lunch?

Gally’s stomach growling says otherwise. Fine.

He will just have to do the 15-plus minute walk to the kitchen. It would be 10 minutes if Gally’s pace can be anything other than ‘drugged snail’ at nine-something in the morning. Maybe if he sticks his hands in his pockets and keeps his head low enough no overly-friendly Munie who can't take a hint will stop to engage him in a _good morning_ chat.

A shower can wait until later, he decides. He shrugs on a jacket, slips into some shoes, and leaves. The air is cooler than most days, strangely enough, and Gally scans the leafy plane before him, taking a moment to breathe in the air. It is silent other than the faint chirp of crickets in the bushes, and trees rustling above. Light scatters across the ground in thick streamers, giving everything an outlandish, sun-bleached look.

They’re about two or three weeks into spring, by Gally’s calculations. He remembers when winter began to chip away into (significantly, as much as you can in a sun-stained world) warmer weather. Wildflowers sprouted in and around the village and died a couple days later. It never snows here.

The moment Gally trots down the stairs his foot lands on a twig. A snap echoes around the wood with surprising volume. All of three seconds pass before a shrill bird call erupts from above. Gally swears.

 

 

The Cafeteria isn’t crowded like it usually is at this time of morning. Everybody else must be relishing in the crisp morning by sleeping in, obligations be damned. Gally would, too, if say, he was a normal person with a normal brain.

He hears Frypan before he sees him, down the wide space of picnic tables, or rather chairs and barrels and palettes arranged to mimic picnic tables. The Cafeteria must have been an old warehouse of a sort, once upon a time. Frypan is chatting with someone he can’t see nor hear in the kitchen. On his trudge down he passes a group of boys and girls who lazily crunch on cereal and toast. They give him a glance as he passes, but not a second. Gally hunches further into his jacket.

“… I’m tellin’ ya, man, it was tall and as hairy as anything.” Frypan is leaning back against a counter, ladle clenched in hand. He waves it around as he talks, voice loud and dramatic. Gally pulls the enigmatic image of an orchestra conductor from deep within.

Then he sees Minho sitting on a bench opposite, eyebrow raised sharp and disbelieving. For a ridiculous half of a second Gally considers about-facing and just sticking it out until lunch.

“Uh-huh,” Minho drawls. His leg swings lightly, heel tapping against the cabinet door, “And this was at what time? And after how many cups of moonshine?”

Frypan makes a face at him, “Laugh all you want – I know what I saw.” It is then he turns and notices Gally awkwardly loitering by the door.

“Oh, hey!” Frypan greets. Gally smiles stiffly, tries not to notice how Minho’s glance immediately drops to an extremely interesting rip at the knee of his khakis, hair falling in front of his eyes, very much not looking at Gally.

“Morning,” He mumbles, cocking his head. “Busy today.”

Frypan scoffs. “Wish it was like this all the time,” he says, but his hands are already moving to slide some bacon and eggs onto a fresh plate, “I swear, people ought’a learn to cook for themselves.” He raises the ladle at Gally, waving it between him and Minho threateningly, “Where’re y’all gonna be if I suddenly drop one day?”

“We still have Amy,” Minho remarks, eyes trained on Frypan. “Thomas is alright, too, I guess,” he shrugs, “I wouldn’t have to leave the house.”

Gally has met Amy a couple times when he’s come in for a snack and Frypan is someplace else. Tall, red hair, with big, kind green eyes. Her voice is high, like a sparrow’s, and she seems to appreciate short conversations, thank God.  She was apparently studying to be a chef when she was kidnapped along with the rest of the Munies.

Frypan hums bitterly, and Gally moves to take the full plate he’s been offered. Years of half-hearted insults and joking around allows him to drop the matter in a second, as he asks, “Where is Thomas, anyway?”

Gally’s back is to Minho now, poking around the drawers for a fork, but he imagines him rolling his eyes.

“Asleep. As usual.”

“Want me to make him a plate?” 

Minho considers this, “Yeah, sure. May as well. Doubt I’ll be able to haul his ass out here before ten, anyway.”

Gally gives up looking for a fork and just uses his fingers to stick a bacon strip into his mouth. He has work in an hour. Maybe because of the nice weather Phillip won’t be  _too_  pissy.

Wishful thinking, but he is allowed to dream.

“Seriously man, I know what I saw. It was crouched around a tree and everything. Branch almost bent in two!”

Minho groans loudly, “Ugh, God, this again?”

“What?” The word slips out of Gally’s mouth before he can stop it. The room goes quiet as a girl Gally vaguely recognizes as a surviving member of Group B walks into the kitchen. Frypan scoops breakfast into a bowl for her in utter silence, which she thanks him for before promptly leaving, glancing back inelegantly. 

People skills aren’t exactly their thing.

When Minho speaks Gally most certainly does  _not_  almost jump out of his skin, “Fry’s convinced he saw Bigfoot in the woods the other night.”

Gally looks up. His eyes meet Minho’s for half a second. Frypan scoffs, “First off: I never said it was Bigfoot. Second: It wasn’t in the woods it was around the crops.”

“Okay, so, it was just an animal. Maybe one of the goats got out? Don’t give me that – There  _are_  animals in the woods, Fry.”

“I’m  _tellin’_  you –” He and Minho launch into a bicker fest. Gally combs his hair out of his eyes and tries to escape. Frypan stops him before he can step out the door. “Gal, what do you think?”

Gally tells him it’s ridiculous and that there is no six-foot hairy beast stalking the settlement and leaves. Walking home he tries not to think about how that was the first thing Minho’s said to him since they’ve been here.

 

 

The non-official name for their little settlement, as people have taken to calling it, is Paradise. Gally calls it a patch of grass trying too hard to look like a middle ground between Heaven and Hell, somewhat off of St. Petersburg, Russia.

It is set in a valley, a woody area with volumes of large hills surrounding, with a lake on the South and a tremendous cliff face North-East.  It took them all of two and a half weeks to realize that they weren’t in America anymore.

(It also took approximately one week and three days for Gladers to stop making Cliff jokes. Gally brooded from a distance.)

One Munie kept on telling everyone that they were somewhere up near Canada, but a voice of long-ago, in the back of Gally’s head told him that the geography suited more to Europe than North America. 

It wasn’t Gally who broke the news. He doesn’t actually know who it was, really, though he has a sneaking suspicion it was Jorge, and boy was it an adventure. The fact that they all may never see their homes ever again, nor were they anywhere  _near_  it, made the situation that much more real.

Hitting one bird with two stones.

Being dumped on a hill next to a shack in the middle of nowhere, it took them nearly four days of exploration to find it. There were Sun bleached plaques and signs everywhere, making it impossible to read, but nevertheless gave the impression that this place was once a town-turned-tourist-attraction-turned-abandoned ghost village. He has a vague memory of Minho shouting at whiny and nervous Munies, scared they would never find real, proper shelter. When children began to grow weary and tired he actually listened to Thomas’s order to calm down.

The cabins were more like houses than your average “camping luxury”, most fully furnished inside, including television and landline phones that didn’t work, despite some people’s best efforts. The majority gave the minority half a while to try and fix them before they were turned over for bonfire material or spare parts.

A town untouched by time, with a giant warehouse in the centre of it, Gally did not care nor need the night’s sleep lost over trying to figure out what happened here.

Three months later, it wouldn’t have made a difference anyway.

 

 

“You’re late, punk.” Phillip’s physical demeanour is still as cranky as it always is, unfortunately for Gally. Hip jutted and foot tapping to boot, Gally earns a glare that would kill if the world worked that way.

He offers a small grimace in return and nothing else as he strides past, through all the shovels, hammers and any kind of construction equipment they could harvest.  Barely slowing he bends to grab an axe, moving around to a pile of slaughtered trees that need to be chopped, stripped and used for shelter.

The only part of the town not untouched was a series of dingy buildings on the outer corner some genius had the brilliant idea of turning into a kind of Market space.

He can feel Phillip’s fiery glare on his back as Gally leisurely strides past, sees Ira’s grin when the man realizes the apology he thought he was going to get never comes. Gally had spent an extra five minutes in the shower then he normally would have. He let the water wash over him, warm and relaxing trying to clear his mind of clutter and junk he hasn’t thought about in years.

He eventually found the corner with the cobwebs and the silence and stayed there until he was ready.

(The memories are the worst sometimes.)

“Morning,” Ira drawls, leaning on an axe.

Gally hums in return before swinging his own down hard onto the first log, not wasting a second. Hopefully, if he does his part quickly enough he can be out of here and away from all the  _people_ with not too much of the day gone.

“You’re chirpy this morning,” His friend remarks, still loitering close by.

Gally raises an eyebrow, “Just like our lovely wildlife?”

Ira snorts loudly. Out of the corner of his eye, Gally can see Phillip’s attention train on them with a reproachful stare.

Back to him, Gally smirks. They make simple small talk – that is, Ira talks and Gally chops lumber like a machine – until lunch. They sit in the cafeteria lazily chewing on sandwiches until their break is over. Outside he can hear Frypan shouting at someone by the crops, Munies laugh and chat and slave away under the clear sky and harsh sun.

Gally nods at whatever Ira is talking about, not feeling up to paying full attention, hands waving about dynamically. He tells himself that he actually enjoys his company, and not just because his bright eyes and easy smile remind him of Ben.

They work for another three hours until Phillip decides that Gally has done enough work for the day to compensate for his grievous offences earlier and sends him off. On the routine exhausted march home, he rounds the corner to see Minho on the roof of one of the houses, metal panel in hand. Thomas is on the ground, gesturing wildly and shouting directions up at Minho.

“… A little more. No, a bit – Left, now. No –  _left_ , Minho!”

Minho pauses, balancing the panel on one knee and wiping damp hair off his forehead. He glares down at his friend. “This  _is_  left, slinthead!”

“Your _other left_ ,” Thomas enunciates. They bicker some more until Minho drops the panel on the roof, fastens it and jumps down. Gally watches as the two shove at each other playfully, until Thomas laughs and Minho happily slings an arm around his shoulders, ruffling his hair.

He quickly walks away.

 

 

The rest of the week passes abysmally uneventful. The following Tuesday Frypan tries out a new recipe – some concoction of potatoes and chilli – and corners Gally between three pallets and a sheet of corrugated iron before his fight of flight motor neurons can kick in. Gally obediently puts a spoonful in his mouth, gives Frypan two thumbs up and spits the foodstuff between pallet one and two when the cook turns away.  He spends the better half of Tuesday night washing his burning mouth.

On Thursday morning some Munie slips off a roof and breaks their shoulder in three places. There is a large crowd, much commotion, and Gally’s brain conjures up the image of Minho doing a balancing act between two solar panels, while his pathetic heart beats horribly for a full minute. He works and retrieves lunch in combined silence and shaky hands, and ignores Amy when she asks him if he is feeling alright.

Saturday nights are annual Glader and Group B “drinking nights”. These three-to-four hours are the only time Gally actually communicates with any other member of both parties regularly, whose name isn’t Frypan. Which, in turn, means holing himself up in the kitchen or slouching in a chair at the corner of the room, nodding, grunting or answering “yes”, “no” or “shuck off” to any given question and/or attempt at friendly small talk.

He keeps away from the girls most of all.

He doesn’t know why. Somewhere in the back of his mind an image flashes of a woman with long, ash-blonde hair and hazel eyes. She is beautiful, tall and neat, but her image leaves a sour taste in his mouth and makes him want to launch the nearest solid object across the room, so Gally doesn’t dwell.

It is surprising that, other than Frypan, Thomas is the one who talks to Gally the second most. He finds that this doesn’t bother him as much as he thinks it should, and their “chats” never last more than three minutes max, so really it isn’t enough to be annoying. Perhaps it’s the  _way_  Thomas speaks to him. It is how he’s taken to speaking to everyone (sans maybe Minho) lately, he’s noticed; cautiously. Not at all timid, but quiet. Reserved.

It’s as if he communicates through a glass screen, with only a small window for sound purposes. He inches away when people step too close, subtly, not enough for you to notice. Unless it’s Gally, who tends to notice everything lately. It’s not inconvenient.

He sees Thomas distancing himself, not talking as much, almost not at all, and averting himself from being touched, even if it’s a pat on the shoulder. Absently, automatically, Gally thinks –  _yeah. That looks familiar_ as a picture of a younger Thomas dressed in white, with paler skin with darker hair and flawless to perfection, dances in his vision.

He finds himself watching Thomas as an alternative to watching Minho. He is not ready to deal with the consequences of getting caught staring, not yet.

Minho is in the living room playing some kind of drinking game Gally recognizes with a couple other Gladers. The room is a cyclone of obnoxious laughter, talking and clinking of glasses, pounding and poking at Gally’s worn-out head. He stiffly gets up and retreats into the kitchen for some space. The coolness of the fridge door as he leans his burning forehead against it does well to calm his nerves. He thinks he will leave in an hour, got to bed and wake up Monday, and then he thinks he shouldn’t have come at all.

He breathes.

And breathes again.

And –

“You okay?”

Gally jerks back, clutching the fridge door for balance. He hisses, “Yes.”

Thomas moves around to the counter, leans against it, hums and gives Gally a look that, with his irritable state, kind of makes him want to punch his face in. It's too knowing.

“Alright. Hiding?”

He grips the refrigerator tighter. “No. I am not  _hiding_ ,” He spits, but then adds, “Thanks very much,” because he has been working on manners.

(Frypan casually chides that he “ought’a be nicer the people” right before very loudly slagging off some Munies for leaving the Cafeteria with their dirty plates left abandoned on the table.)

Thomas nods, “Okay, okay.”

He is quiet as Gally pries his hands off the cold steel, empties his drink out in the sink and re-fills the jar with water. Their “conversations” also tend not to last long enough for Gally to start thinking about a knife, and a kid, and so much blood. And he is grateful for that.

Then Thomas goes and says, “Not sleeping well,” and it isn’t a question.

Gally pauses, glass clinking against the countertop, and side-eyes him. Thomas is alert and curious, back to the boy in the Maze. He is such a back-and-forth these days it almost makes Gally’s head hurt more.

He sighs, “No, I haven’t.”

Thomas looks at his hands, nodding, and Gally only just notices the circles under his eyes, “Me neither.”

They stand in not-so-awkward silence for a minute, sipping their drinks and enjoying the safe haven of the kitchen. Gally glances at the clock. It is almost 9 p.m. He wonders if he can get away with leaving this early just as Minho stumbles into the room, tipsily yelling at Thomas.

“Hey, Greenie! You wanna join the party, or –” He stops then, feet scraping to a halt on the linoleum, spotting Gally. He has a glass in his hand, the amber liquid almost drained. He wonders if this is his first drink of the night, remembers Minho always being a lightweight.

Thomas rolls his eyes, “What? I’ve only been gone, like, five minutes. Miss me that much?”

Minho looks away, scoffs, and crosses the room in an easy stride to sling his arm around Thomas’s neck. He winces as Minho leans all his weight on to him.

“Whatever,” he says and turns to Gally. The air in the room thickens and Gally wishes he was someplace else.

Minho tilts his head and tightens his arm around Thomas. “Sorry to interrupt your little gossip session,” he says, and his shit-eating grin puts Gally's teeth on edge.

He doesn’t miss Thomas elbowing Minho in the ribs even though his eyes are trained, glaring. He wants to say,  _Relax, I’m not trying to steal your boyfriend._  Instead, he mimics, “Whatever.”

He drains his water, forgetting it is water and wishing for something stronger, and storms out of the room.

He makes it as far as the second couch before some slinthead notices him escaping and calls him out. In seconds the room is filled with drunken encouragements and shouts to stay, and Gally doesn’t even think half the people that are chanting his name have spoken to him before in their lives. On the other end, he sees Thomas pull Minho out of the kitchen, stormy. Minho’s eyes lock on to his, over the shouting of “ _Ga-lly! Ga-lly!_ ” and he only wants to be in his bed with a locked door and a thin blanket to separate him and the rest of the world even more.

In one move he turns and walks out the door, not caring about the loud “ _Boo!_ ”s and insults that chase him through the air. It is a hot, humid night, but he shivers.

 

 

Sunday is the weekly “lazy day” amongst Paradise, yet Gally’s plan to sleep through it dies in the ass as soon as 8 a.m. rolls around and that bird starts up again. Gally groans, clenching the knife in his fist. He kicks the pillows at the head of the bed, frustrated. Last night leaves a bad taste in his mouth.

Regardless, he lies there until nine, staring blankly at the cracked ceiling, counting the stains until the bird cares enough to shut up. Until someone knocks on his door not fifteen minutes later. Until his neck is starting to stiffen and his bored brain begins to supply him with saturated colours of a flowerbed of azaleas, a bleached out picket fence and a man with eyes like his, but with a smile far too warm and kind for Gally to ever manage.

His door is knocked on twice more before he harvests enough inner strength to get up. It is particularly sunny today, yet no humidity. Maybe he will walk down to the lake and see if he remembers how to swim. Gally takes an old book off the rickety case in the living room, and with coffee he lounges back on the couch, long legs splayed. He doesn’t read the book; he opens it at a random point and reads the first word of every line down the page. He feels a kind of spiritual connection to things that are jumbled and nonsense. 

Life is beginning to fill his bones again when his door is knocked on the fourth time. Gally puffs dark hair out of his eyes – it’s getting long, he should probably feel like doing something about that – and stomps over to the front door.

Minho is standing on his porch looking like regret. Whatever uncalled for abuse Gally was going to shout at the visitor dissipates. They’re both quiet for a moment, each waiting for the other to speak first.

Minho eventually says, “Erm,” and immediately looks like he has made the biggest mistake of his life.

Gally sighs, deciding to humour him. “Do you need something?”

Minho shifts his weight, “I, just um. Just wanted to say.” He talks like he’s in pain. Gally raises his eyebrows, blinking in innocence, “Just everything, okay, um, yesterday.” How forced he looks could be hilarious, actually. “Sorry.”

Gally presses his lips and raises both eyebrows, blinking, “Oh?”

“Yes.”

Silence. “Alright.”

“Cool.”

More silence.

Gally taps the door frame, “Is that it?”

Minho’s eyes are slightly bloodshot, and his face has an ashen appearance. His hair is its usual untidy mop, falling in his eyes. Gally’s fingers itch with annoyance. For a moment Minho looks like he considers high-tailing it, but then he says, “People are heading over to the lake if you want to … join.”

The only answer Gally is capable of is staring in confusion.

“If you, yeah. Aren’t doing anything, of course.”

He blinks once, slowly, “Okay.”

Minho looks at him like he hadn’t thought so far ahead as Gally actually agreeing to spend time with him. Gally notices the shirt he is wearing is sleeveless, creasing when Minho folds his arms tight against his chest. He focuses on the space between his eyebrows instead.

“That okay?”

Gally wants to say,  _No. Not really. You don’t talk to me for three months and here you are “apologizing” and asking me to hang out like shit didn't happen. The hell?_

_Like –_

“Yeah. Sure. It’s fine, man.” His voice sounds foreign and robotic, “Sounds fun.”  

The boy nods, slowly. He opens his mouth to say something else, but decides against it and just walks away. Gally watches him definitely not half-run down the stairs and disappears around a shrub.

That was … something.

 _Baby steps_ , Gally thinks. He shakes his head and closes the door, a funny kind of warmth settling in his chest.

Birds of paradise, or something like that.

 

 

It is close to eleven by the time Gally arrives at the lake, where he finds a group of a dozen or so kids messing around and gallivanting in the water. Another group occupies the shore, while everyone else either keeps to a small, close-knit crowd or to themselves. Gally notices two boys from the Glade with a Munie laughing jubilantly in the cool shade. He sees a girl lying under a lone tree – arm over her eyes, looking relaxed in her solitude.

To each their own.

As usual, Frypan’s voice floods through the air before he can spot him. 

He doesn’t need to look far. Frypan is seated a few paces left retelling his big foot theory to a few poor bastards. Among those bastards are Minho and Thomas – the former groans very loudly and drops his head onto Thomas’s shoulder, who is nodding along to the cook’s fantastical story and looking like he is struggling with some kind of inner debacle.  He wonders if this is Thomas’s first time hearing this.

Frypan spots Gally mid dramatic arm swing and calls him over. He subtly pretends not to notice and heads off to find shade in a somewhat quiet spot, sinks down onto the soft grass with a relieved sigh. Along the shore, he watches as one Group B girl playfully runs and dodges another, her long hair like wildfire in the sunlight.

Gally picks absently at a thread in his shorts that may or may not have been there three minutes ago, seeing but not seeing the way the sun glistens off the water, making everything look too shiny and ethereal. He doesn’t notice the girl approach him.

“Hey,” she says, voice low and even, and Gally recognizes her from under the tree earlier.

“Hey,” he says back.

She gestures vaguely to the ground, “Mind if I sit?”

“Sure.”

It strikes him that he hasn’t seen her around much, if not at all, so he doesn’t know which part of their society she belongs to. However, as she sits down she purposely accommodates negative space between herself and Gally. Her movements are calm and cautious like she is trying not to disturb something, and Gally knows then.

They sit not talking for a long while before she says, “They act like everything’s okay. Like nothing happened at all.” Then she says, “They’re all idiots.” And Gally instantly likes her.

The girl turns to him, hair framing her face in the wind, and she carries an air of constant exasperation. “I’m Beth.” She says, holding a palm out to Gally. She has a small, faint scar on her left eyebrow and her lips are chapped.  She doesn’t smile.

“Gally.” He shakes her hand. Her grip is strong.

“You’re a Group A boy, right?” She asks, but her tone implies she already knows the answer. It’s weird hearing her call him that. Although he guesses, this is what a member of Group B must feel like. It didn’t occur to him they might be anything other than  _Gladers_.

“Yeah.”

Two Munies try and push each other off another two Munies shoulders, and Gally lets this occupy his attention for a minute. Then Beth asks, “So, how is life outside the walls treating ya?”

Gally takes a deep breath and leans back, tightening his arms around his knees. He considers not answering the question, because how is life treating him? All of three people will actually talk to him – the others just nod and acknowledge his presence. Which, to be honest, isn’t the worst thing that can happen (aside from being passive-aggressively told off and awkwardly apologized to the next day).

He barely sleeps. Sometimes he can’t stand the bed because it is too comfortable, sleeping on the living room floor for weeks. He gets flashes of street signs and hears a dog barking at random occurrences during the day. His fingers scratch at something at the base of his spine that is no longer there. The world blurs in and out of focus sometimes.

How is life?

“Could be better.” He says. Beth raises an eyebrow, and Gally elaborates, “It fucking sucks.” because to be completely honest he doesn’t feel like using Glader slang with her. One look in her eye and Gally can tell she understands everything, and then some.

Beth toes at a stick, “They made me kill our new girl.”

Five minutes later Gally says, “They made me kill a kid.”

Beth looks at him, mouth twitching for half a second, “We should get jackets.”

Gally smirks, despite everything. The wind picks up, and Beth catches a leaf in her hand. They look over at the various teenagers swimming and running around in the sun, until Beth leans over to him, still keeping a distance, points over by the shore and whispers, “That stick wants me dead.”

The boy in question is one Gally has seen hanging about Thomas. He always looks a little lost but will not hesitate to kick someone’s ass if they offer him directions. Aaron, was it? No.

Erm …

“Does he, now?” Gally muses.

Beth shrugs. Her arms mimic Gally’s, around her knees. “I don’t see why not. The girl I … The girl. He and her were close.” Her voice turns wispy. “I can see how he looks at me sometimes, like I don’t deserve to be here.” She huffs, resting her head on her knee. “Do you get that?”

Gally stops his eyes from wandering over to where Thomas is. He answers, “I don’t know.”

Then, “Maybe.”

And then, “Sometimes.”

Beth seems to regard him with a kind of interest but decides not to push the subject. She returns to looking bored. Sighing wistfully, she half-announces to Gally that she is going for a swim before taking off without another word. Gally hears, “Howdy, neighbour,” and Thomas’s voice returns the greeting before he rounds the tree and climbs the small hill.

“There you are!” he says, and he is practically smiling and Gally all of just dies from shock.  _It is a day full of surprises_ , he thinks.

He falls on the grass, looking like he’s just run a marathon. Thomas gestures somewhere vague, “Is Frypan – ?”

“No. He isn’t.”

Thomas nods once, “Okay,” he says slowly. He shakes his head, “Minho convinced you to come?”

“He twisted my arm.”

Thomas smirks. “Good that. You know,” he begins, “he must have been in a mood or something. I heard him leave the house three times this morning within the hour.”

Gally looks up. Thomas’s tone is nonchalant and casual, but a look in his eye says otherwise. Gally tries to recall what time it was when his front door was first knocked on, then stops himself. Thomas shrugs, “Or, I don’t know. Who knows, really.”

His expression tells Gally  _he promised me he would try and be less of a slinthead_  and Gally stands up.

“I’m going for a swim,” he says, and walks away.

 

 

“Going for a swim” implies using one’s body to wade through the water with their arms and legs at an even and rhythmic pace. What Gally does is strip down at the quiet end of the lake and stand chest deep, eyes closed, focusing on the feel of the water and the manual task of breathing. The water is a good temperature – warm but not unpleasant. He draws patterns and watches as they form ripples that undulate softly against his skin, whilst the feeling of  _waiting_  and  _Port_  and  _away, far away, for a very long time_ fills him up. The sun’s glisten off the lake is harder to ignore here, as each beam of light articulates and pronounces every wrinkle. He closes his eyes.

The images are shiny and perfect, like something out of an old movie. Crystal. White-washed, bright and saturated. The image changes, yet it doesn’t. He is looking over the heads of people in the crowd, trying to spot the water or something in it. Then he can see it perfectly, high above the crowd, though he is smaller.  _Laughter_  and  _joy_  and  _safety_  swell in his chest.

Then  _sadness_  and  _lonely_  and  _please –_   

“Hey.”

Gally’s sure he resembles a distressed fish at that moment. His hand instinctively moves to his hip for the knife, before he remembers it is still buried between mattress and bedframe. He huffs, pushing wet hair out of his eyes, turning.

Minho is standing atop a small hill, looking somewhere between sheepish and mildly amused, “Um …” he bites off a smirk and it boils Gally’s blood.

“Don’t do that!” He shouts, scratching at his scalp as embarrassment begins to sink in, and spits, “The shuck do you want?”

Minho folds his arms, “Just checking to make sure you haven’t drowned or anything.”

“That’s sweet of you,” Gally mocks, rolling his eyes.

Minho flashes a grin. Gally looks away, frowns and awkwardly traces the water.

“No, but really. You plannin’ on sleepin’ here tonight?”

Gally blinks up at the boy, who has now donned a hoodie. His hair is damp and pushed back, with eyebrows raised sardonically. Gally looks over the water and realizes that the sunny gleam is now almost completely gone, as is the sun itself.  _How long have I been standing here?_  He thinks. Minho absently kicks a rock as Gally is wading through the water back to shore. He climbs out of the lake, dripping wet and angry.

And practically naked. Minho looks up, stutters, and spins around. Gally doesn’t think he’s ever seen anything more stupid.

“Really?” He says, bending down to retrieve his shorts.

He can  _hear_  Minho rolling his eyes, and imagines his cheeks are red, too. (Gally holds a kind of bizarre pride over the fact that he is still the only one who can make him blush).

“You're naked, dude.”

“And? Why the shuck do you care?”

“It’s called common courtesy.”

Gally snorts, buttoning his shorts, “My! You’re just a big ol’ gentleman nowadays, huh?”

“Cut the attitude, asshole.”

“What attitude? This is just my –” he pulls his t-shirt on “– natural charm.” Gally hears Minho snort. It’s colder now, and Gally bites down a shiver and decides to push it just a little more.

“Are you blushing?”

“No.” Minho answers curtly.

“Bet you are.”

“I’m not.”

Gally locates his shoes, “S’not like there’s anything you haven’t seen before ...”

Minho’s entire body goes stiff. A storm radiates off his shoulders. Eventually, he says, “Just hurry up,” voice sounding strained.

Gally slips the final shoe on, “Already done.” There is a chill in the air he doesn’t think has anything to do with the weather. Minho stuffs his hands in his pockets and spins back around, expression wavering. It settles on fuming and he spits,

“You are such a dick, do you know that?”

Gally keeps his face blank, “Been told a few times, yeah.”

Minho opens his mouth, closes it, opens it again but no words emit. He shakes his head. “I’m guessing you know the way back,” he says, tautly.

“Yes.”

“Cool.”

“Excellent.”

“ _Great_.” Minho grits his teeth and stomps down to the other end of the lake, toward the settlement. Fifty meters or so away he calls, “Try not to fall in a ditch and die!” followed by some choice Glader  _and_  Munie profanities, trailing behind him in the wind like a cape.

Gally waits until Minho and his lungs have disappeared into the wood and goes home. There is a ping in his chest – warm, but not unpleasant. 

 

 

They purposely avoid each other for two weeks. Gally thinks that is a reasonable amount of time to give someone space to prevent them coming at you with a hack-saw. He spends his time with the usual people – loitering in the kitchen with Frypan and helping him out by the crops whenever he has some spare time. Ira shows up at his house at random intervals, as Gally has become used to. He genuinely likes being around Ira, he’s decided, as he never has to talk much and he can just listen to the guy’s voice drone on and on about everything and nothing, and not have to think.

Memories come with dreams. He wakes up kicking the pillows and hitting the sheets and mattress. The usual.

Beth is an interesting new addition. One morning she sits herself down at Gally’s table during breakfast like it is her normal daily routine, and has continued to do so nearly every morning. She picks off his plate when she’s finished hers and vents to him about the smallest of things you wouldn’t normally talk to a stranger about. Gally wonders how many things he has given this girl permission for with that one simple “sure” that day. Ira’s face when he sees Gally and Beth sitting together like old friends is  _wonderful_.

He sits with Gally a whole lot more after that if it is possible.

Gally skips over more Saturday Night Parties, not bothered enough. He really doesn’t need a bunch of drunken and high teenagers falling over him and all around being annoying, or Thomas seeking him out when he gets too claustrophobic. Or Minho …

Just Minho, really.

They see each other in Frypan’s kitchen occasionally. Gally keeps his distance, and Minho fumes still, from the other side of the room. Gally guesses it is better than him pretending that he doesn’t exist. He may be silently plotting his death, but at least he looks at him. His door is not knocked on at 9 am, however. A week later they nod to each other in passing. 

Baby steps.

The crops are defaced one Monday morning. Gally strolls over to the Cafeteria and hears shouting over from the fields. Upon inspection, he sees that nearly half the produce has been destroyed – ripped out of the soil or chewed up. It’s a spectacle that draws a lot of commotion from most of the village. Famers shout in anger, while Munies cry out in worry and distress. Thomas attempts to calm everyone down.

“We will plant more crops,” he is saying. “We’ll be able to make up for the lost ones in no time, don’t worry!”

Men and women shout about food shortages and feeding their children. Gally thinks about getting him a bucket to stand on.

“Everything will just have to be stricter, for a little while.” He mentions rations and the voices raise. “It won’t be for long!” he promises. The crowd slowly disperses fifteen minutes later, and Thomas wipes his forehead and sighs in relief. The sun is particularly harsh this morning.

Beside Gally, Frypan leans over and says, “Still think there isn’t something terrorizing the village?”

Some meters away, behind a broken corn stalk, Minho groans very loudly.

“Oh, for the ever loving shuck  _– animals exist!_ ”

Frypan throws his arms in the air. “What animal, Minho?  _What. Animal?_ ”

Minho rises up, half-crouched. “How ‘bout you come over here and I’ll shucking show you any shucking animal you wanna shucking see, you –”

“Minho, just shut up!” Thomas explodes. One fist is clenched in his hair and he looks ready to launch himself across the field and knock his best friend’s lights out. Everyone goes quiet and still, as most people usually do when Thomas gets heated.

He turns to Frypan, “Listen, I really need you to stop spreading that story around. People are having a hard time settling in here as it is, they don’t need to start thinking some seven foot wilder beast is stalking their houses at night.”

“I never said it was a –”

Thomas sighs in irritation,“Fry,  _please_. For the love of shuck.”

“You still sound ridiculous when you try to use Glader words.”

Thomas clenches his jaw and glares. Gally tries not to flinch. He remembers in vivid detail the last time Thomas was livid and still has the scars to prove it. Frypan raises his palms in surrender.

“Alright, alright, Greenie. I’ll tone it down.” He groans, looking at what is left of the crops. “Just don’t expect a gourmet meal anytime soon.”

Thomas seems satisfied with that. “Thanks, man.” He pats Frypan on the shoulder and retreats over to Minho, who looks slightly betrayed, and mad about being yelled at. 

Frypan rests his hands on his hips, glaring after the boy, “He’s touchy lately. Gives you back in the Glade a run for your money.”

Frypan realizes what he said as soon as it leaves his mouth, but it’s too late by then. He immediately turns to Gally, face cloaked in apology.

“Shit, Gal. I must have klunk in my brains, or something, I –”

Gally interrupts him. “It’s fine. I don’t care.” He gestures vaguely to the field, “Lemme know if you need an extra pair of hands,” and begins to walk away.

“Wait, uh, did you want me to fix ya something?” Frypan calls after him.

“Lost my appetite,” Gally responds. He scratches absently at his neck. On the way out of the fields he catches Minho looking over at him, and fools himself into thinking that he looks concerned.

 

 

He feels the cold all over, like he is being submerged in a tank of ice. He pounds hopelessly at glass walls, unbreakable. Solid. Confining. Drowning him.

He is drowning. There is a pain in the back of his neck, strong and sharp. It is piercing the flesh and bone, deep. His body spasms uncontrollably. In his hand is a small object.  _A_   _knife_. He thinks. _No._ The _knife._  Gally feels its cool, sharp edge against his skin. Then it is gone.

And screaming.

And crying.

And blood.  _So much blood_. 

Then black.

 

 

Gally wakes up screaming that night, tears running down his face, and his lips form an apology he doesn’t know how to give.

 

 

Things around Paradise are routine and boring for a while. Twice as many people are working in the fields to hurry and fix the food situation. Gally is among these people, though he keeps to himself, barely talking to anyone, sometimes for days. Work on the market and building repairs are put to a temporary halt, most agreeing that feeding the village is of paramount importance against anything else. It hasn’t rained in two weeks.

Gally feels himself going a little crazy. He has cut out everything to do with the Maze, which means no Gladers, no Group B members – Beth has noticed his drastic decline in mood and is keeping her respectful distance – and no Ira, even. Gally doesn’t need to look at him and think of Griever stings and banishments, for his sake more than Gally’s. He tries sleeping the right way round, but it doesn’t work. He lies away staring at the ceiling until the bird starts chirping. He can’t stand more than a few minutes in the shower.

Gally completely loses it at a Munie after three weeks of this. The days are getting hotter, and summer is right around the corner. His nose and arms are burnt, and his shoulders are peeling. He is dizzy and irritable, and some poor Munie who probably feels the same makes the mistake of swinging his gardening hoe a little too close to Gally’s foot.

“Hey!” he shouts, jumping back. The Munie looks up in shock, eyes wide, and he pulls his instrument away from Gally. “Watch it with that thing!”

The guy stammers. He is red in the face and looks exhausted. “Damn it, man, I’m sorry. I – I, er. I didn’t …”

“You what?” Gally prompts, cruelly. He realizes that this is the first time he has spoken to another human being in weeks, and that the kid looks ready to pass out, or cry, or both. Still, this isn’t enough to make him back off, “How ’bout paying attention to what you’re fucking doing!”

The Munie flinches back. He is using his hoe for balance, “Dude, I said I was sorry. It wasn’t on purpose; I’m just a little tired.”

Gally lets his own instrument fall to the ground. “Yeah? Well, we’re all  _a little tired_.” he snarls, getting in the guy’s face. Other workers are starting to stare. “It’s a million fucking degrees, and these crops barely have enough time to grow before they’ve shrivelled up and died!” The Munie takes another step back. Gally follows. “So how about you go work over there where you have less of a chance of  _cutting somebody’s fucking limb off!_ ”

Gally pronounces this with a too-hard shove, and the guy falls to the ground with a thump.

It isn’t the Munie’s cry of pain as he falls on his arm, or the horrific  _crunch_  that follows, that wakes Gally up. Nor is it the shouts of shock from the surrounding men and women. It is Minho when he comes charging toward them, like a hurricane, screaming about what the hell is going on.

In one move he has Gally by the collar, pushing him back roughly. Gally stumbles and catches himself, struggling in Minho’s relentless grip.

“Get off – Don’t shucking touch me!”

“You need to take a timeout,” Minho says, his voice low and threatening, inches away from Gally’s. He can see the beads of sweat on his forehead, the deep flush on his cheeks and neck. Gally’s skin itches and he leans closer.

“Get. Off. Me.” He pronounces, every cell in his body is shaking, his blood is boiling. He’s suddenly aware that his breath is probably horrible. Minho’s is no better. Their noses are a hair width away. “ _Now_.”

Minho doesn’t flinch, “Man, back up. Take a breather. Calm the shuck down.”

Gally scoffs, narrowing his eye, “Are you’re gonna make me?”

Minho is about to say something else, but then his eyes drop, and Gally is suddenly fully aware of their proximity, notices now that he’s taller – maybe to do with the land they’re standing on – the sweat on Minho’s skin, how his cheeks flushed red, and his lips that are parted, and he is breathing heavily, and –

“Minho.” Thomas’s voice breaks through the vail. Minho snaps out of his trance and leans away from Gally, looking slightly lost. He removes one hand from his shirt and glances back at Thomas, who is leaning over the injured Munie, “He needs to get to a Med.”

Something unspoken passes between the two of them, and it feels like an entire conversation is had in few short moments. Something ugly rises up inside Gally, and another, resembling that blind hatred he had for Thomas in the Glade, resurfaces. “I got this,” Minho says, cocking his head at Gally.

Thomas nods carefully, wipes damp hair off his forehead, and helps the kid stand with a couple other workers. He looks over at Minho, and at Gally, then back at Minho and gives him this  _look_  that says a million different things and Gally’s mouth tastes sour. He lets Minho drag him down the hill away from the crops, releasing him only when they are at the bottom. He is a tense presence as he walks Gally back to his house, a ghost of something occupying the negative space between them.

“Come back when you remember how to be a human being again,” Is what he says, snarls more like, and abandons Gally on his porch. 

“I  _don’t_  remember! That’s the problem!” Is what Gally shouts after him, and slams his front door shut.

He paces the house in a furious frenzy, his brain screaming at him a mile a minute. He tries to breathe deeply and calm down, to no prevail. He is hot, too hot. His shoulders and back are killing him, his hands are blistered and raw. He keeps seeing Minho in his mind, his eyes black and stormy and concerned and something else. He also sees Thomas, sees Minho looking at him, laughing with him and hugging him. Constantly touching him.

He briefly wonders if they’re fucking. And the thought makes him die a little inside.

Gally punches the kitchen cabinet so hard that it rips off its hinges.

 

 

Gally is alone for another two days before he receives a knock on his front door. He is lounged in the living room, reading first words when he hears it. Beth is standing on his porch and Gally thinks he can see smoke coming out of her ears. He blinks at her senselessly, and in a second her hand is across his cheek.  _Hard_.

Gally’s head snaps to the side, eyes wide in shock, a deep sting spearing on his skin. “What the hell was that?” He shouts as the shock has fades, eyes burning.

Beth crosses her arms and glares, “Whatever is going on with you needs to stop,” she says, “Snap out of it.”

“Excuse me?”

 _Slap_. 

“OW!” He cries.

Beth raises her finger at him threateningly, “You are not allowed to ignore me, you’re my only friend. Okay? So stop being a baby.” With one final glare she turns and leaves, hair brushing against his nose. Bounding down the stairs, Beth commands over her shoulder, “We’re having lunch in half an hour. Be there. And shower!”

Gally watches her walk away, hair swaying in her stride. He sighs and closes the door. Standing in the hallway he feels stuffy and closed-in, suddenly, Beth’s voice ringing in his brain. He guesses the blows must have knocked a thing or two around. He opens all the windows, duct tapes the cabinet door back in place, and takes a shower for twenty minutes.

 

 

Beth is already seated, working on a sandwich by the time Gally arrives at the Cafeteria. He walks the aisle and sits down silently, mouth dry and refusing to try and form words. Beth glances up, and there is a look in her eye that could be approval, but who knows really.

“Look who’s all shiny and clean.”

Gally rolls his eyes and accepts a plate when it is offered to him. He picks at the lettuce and drops the tomatoes on to Beth’s plate, and, weirdly enough, just like that, it seems as if everything is moving back to normal. The fresh air is doing his brain good. She tells him that the crops are doing better and that they should be expecting rain soon. He asks her how she knows this and she grins at him secretly, chewing her food. They carry on in comfortable silence until Gally hears a familiar argumentative voice deriving from the kitchen. He sighs, wipes his hands on his pants and tells Beth he’ll be back.

Amy is stood in the centre of the kitchen, eyebrows furrowed. “No,” she is saying, “If we wait too long to harvest we’ll just be in the same exact situation again.”

Frypan signs in exasperation, “Yes, but we don’t wanna be makin’ ten trips up to the fields every week. If we wait –”

“For what? For them to go brown?”

“No – and storage? What about that?”

“We  _have_  storage, Siggy. And then we’ll have more. The building process has started up again.” It has?

Gally decides to end this argument because it obviously isn’t going anywhere constructive on the Glader’s end.

“She’s right,” he says, and immediately receives two pairs of eyes on him, one pleased and the other surprised annoyance. Gally raises his palms, “Sorry, Fry, but she is. As much as I hate the thought of harvesting too quickly, we really can’t risk it. Not with our luck.”

Amy grins widely, “ _Thank you_ , Gally.” And glances back at Frypan expectantly.

Finally, the cook sighs, a bit dramatically. “Fine. We’ll start Tuesday.”

The girl smiles brightly in triumph at both of them and leaves, taking a plate of her own lunch with her. The room is quiet. Gally leans against an island, not quite knowing what to do with his hands. Frypan fiddles with a ladle before groaning and setting it down, scratching at his beard.

“Sorry, Fry.” Gally begins, softly.

Frypan waves a hand, “Nah, it’s fine. I guess it is the best thing to do –”

“No. Not about that.”

Frypan looks up, eyes big and still so, so sorry. He reminds Gally of a dog, remembers one with grey-brown fur and a wagging tail. He wonders whatever happened to Bark.

“Gally, I’m –”

Gally shakes his head, “Uh-uh. Don’t even. Let’s just …” he shrugs, eyebrow-raising, “move on?”

Frypan’s face is still for a few moments and then breaks into a blinding smile, “Good that.”

An idea strikes him then, “Hey,” Gally starts, “It’s Saturday, isn’t it?”

“Yeah, why?”

Gally glances around the kitchen and locates one cupboard in particular. He crosses the room and begins pulling out various sized jars, leaving the largest to the side. He turns back to a puzzled Frypan, “You keep the moonshine where?”

Realization dawns on the cook’s face, “Shuck yes,” he grins and jumps into action. Gally smirks and waits for the cook to return, drumming his fingers on the bench. He asks Beth if she would like to help him, and the girl’s eyes light up with intrigue.

 

 

Eight hours later kids are sculling down Gally’s mixture or moonshine and God-knows-what-else. It still tastes like absolute klunk even after all this time but serves its purpose. That is, to get them very drunk, very fast. Gally indulges himself, gulping down a glass in record time, and everything takes on a hazy glow. Sometime into the night he slings his arm around Frypan’s neck, and they sing a song Gally can’t recall the name of, yet can spout every word perfectly, sans very,  _very_  off key. Gally gets progressively drunker as the night progresses, stumbling happily. The kitchen is blinding white. He squints at it in meaningless determination. 

He finds Thomas, eventually, in the hall, and wastes no time in pulling him into the living room. “Hey!” He might be shouting, there is no way to tell.

Thomas blinks at him in surprise, obviously not as far gone. “Hey!” He returns, chuckling nervously.

Gally grabs another glass and shoves it at Thomas, “I’ve had an epiphany,” he announces.

Thomas takes a sip, immediately making a face, and manages to cough out, “Have you?”

“Yep!” Gally takes another sip. Or gulp. “I’m an asshole.”

Thomas raises an eyebrow. Or two. Or four. It’s hard to tell. He should stop raising so many eyebrows, he looks ridiculous, “Really?”

“Don’t deny it.”

“Well …”

“No, no. It’s cool,” Gally says, “I’ve made amends with it.” He points at his cheek.

Thomas nods like he knows exactly what Gally is talking about. The drink is working on him, fast, and he takes another sip and asks Gally, “What is in this stuff?”

Gally laughs. It feels nice. He hasn’t done that in a while. He taps at his temple, “Secret!” And Thomas rolls his eyes upward. They really are nice – kind of intense, but nice. Like liquid silver. Gally is honestly surprised he is letting him stand so close to him and puts it down to the drink. The last time they were this close Thomas had murder in his pretty eyes.

Gally thinks about his Thomas and Minho theory but shakes it away. It makes his stomach turn, and chest hurt, and where is Minho, anyway? They are hardly ever separate, yet Thomas is here and he hasn’t seen Minho once this night. It is a possibility that he has said all of this out loud, because Thomas is giving him this preposterous look and shaking his head. He is talking but Gally can’t really hear him. He stares at his mouth, remembering Minho’s. Remembering those early days in the Glade he isn’t allowed to think about anymore. Remembering a time when he was able to feel anything other than hatred and despair and bone-crippling fear. 

Gally wants those days back, he decides, and leans forward whilst forgetting about balance, and is stumbling into Thomas’s arms. “Whoa, whoa, whoa!” The boy shouts, catching him. Gally laughs into his shoulder. The room is spinning, or Gally is. He spins all the way over to the sofa. He hears voices talking all around, talking to him. He hears Frypan slur his name, and Thomas saying something in return. Gally laughs into a pillow.

Then another voice says, “Well. At least he’s having fun, I guess.” And he laughs even harder.

He must fall in and out of consciousness, because the next thing he knows he is he is outside, the night air filling his lungs pleasantly, cooling his skin and making him lethargic. The lights strung on the porch are nice, big and glowy. He tries to catch one but is too far away. Someone has a hold of him around the middle, their hand firmly grasping his wrist.

“You sure you got ‘im?” Frypan!

Gally states into the night and to all witnesses that Frypan is his friend. About seven times. And that he is a very good cook, but needs to work on the chilli. Someone snickers. The grip around his waist and arm tightens.

“Yeah, I got him,” He groans, close to Gally’s ear, and Gally turns his head to look straight into a pair of deep, dark eyes.

“I’m got,” He whispers, “Don’t you worry about that.” Then, he is being pulled away, the sound of a door closing and muffling the noise of partying teenagers can be heard. Gally attempts to jump over every stone he sees, much to the displeasure of his aid.

“Would you just shucking walk?” Minho snaps, and groans once more, “My  _God_ , you’re heavy. You don’t look heavy.”

Gally snickers, but complies and buries his face in his neck, which doesn’t help much with the walking issue. He wonders how Minho has survived the magic liquor – he is near drunk with half a cup of normal moonshine. Eh. Just another mystery. Gally’s legs move on their own, and the world fades again.

He wakes to Minho saying, “Your  _keeeeey_ , Gally. To your  _hoooouuse_ ,” slowly. He smells nice. Like pine and salt water. Gally nearly passes out again, if not for the jab to his ribs. He loses balance and Minho swears and catches him. Minho groans into his shoulder for the third – Fourth? Fifth? – time this evening. Gally wraps his arms around him comfortably.

“Pocket,” Gally slurs and loses consciousness until he feels the hard comfort of the mattress against his back, and a sigh of relief emitting from above. He also feels the pillow against his cheek and it is all wrong. He tries to turn around and almost face-plants off the bed.

“What are you –” Minho catches him. Again. “Oh, my God. Just go to sleep.”

Gally’s feet kick against the pillow, and he moans happily. After a moment footsteps sound and Gally lunges out in panic, shouting, “Wait!” and grasping material.

A sigh, “ _Gally_.”

“Wait … Just. Stay,” He pleads, voice as soft as he’s ever heard it.

Silence.

“Please.”

“Gally …”

“You. You can’t leave yet – I haven’t fixed things. I need to fix things.”

More sighing, but softer. Like pity, “I have no idea what you’re talking – Look. Just. Just go to sleep. It’ll be fine.”

Gally’s fingers grasp air. Unconsciousness takes him.

 

 

When Gally wakes up in the morning, he is sure he’s in Hell. The biggest headache he has ever experienced in his life scrapes at his skull, pounding away. His stomach is turning, and everything is too bright, too loud. His fingers claw at the sheets hopelessly, and he groans. Everything hurts. He is going to die.

Attempting to sit up is another thing entirely, and in a second his eyes water and he sways like he’s on a boat, lost at sea. Gally swings his legs off the bed and stagger-runs to the bathroom, where he spends five minutes or twenty or an hour emptying the contents of his stomach into the toilet. When he finally thinks he can stand without falling straight over, Gally detaches himself from the bowl and manoeuvres his exhausted body over to the living room, only to immediately stop.

Because Minho is asleep on his couch.

Gally is too stunned to move. He has a vague memory, in between consciousness, of asking –  _begging_  – Minho to stay with him, to which he regrets with the deepest mortification. Gally mentally shakes himself and tries to tiptoe out of the room.

And of course the floorboard creeks, jolting Minho from his sleep.

He starts awake, flying up, landing on one knee for balance, arms flailing out for something to grasp. His bangs cover one eye, and he looks slightly like a deranged bird. Gally bites at his mouth. 

Minho’s eyes lock on to Gally barely balancing in the threshold. He blinks once, twice, and smooths his hair back.

“Mornin’.”

Gally nods, not trusting his voice.

Minho gives him a once over. “You look like Hell took a dump,” he smirks, and if Gally weren’t so out of it he wouldn’t be agreeing.

He clutches the wall firmly, throws a lazy hand in Minho’s general direction, clearing his throat, “You, erm. You’re still here.”

Panic flashes in Minho’s eyes, as if he is just realizing this himself. “Yeah,” he says, and for a moment considers elaborating but can’t find the energy. He pounds his fist at a cushion a couple times, pointing to a seemingly random spot on the sofa, “You know, you’re couch is weirdly comfortable. There’s just this kink,  _here_.” He rubs his shoulder.

Gally pins it down to the hangover that he thinks,  _Yeah, well, the bed’s better._ He sighs and looks away, as Minho finally rights himself.

“C’mon.”

Gally follows him into the kitchen, at a much slower pace, and finds Minho poring him a glass of water. He takes it, hands shaky, and not sure he can pin  _that_  on the hangover, not completely, “Take small sips or you’ll just make yourself even sicker.”

“I know what to do.”

Minho raises his palms, shrugs, “Alright,” and looks around the room, probingly. “Man, I’m starving.”

Gally sits at the table, the mere thought of food making his stomach turn, but he says, “There’s some cereal in there,” he points, “and coffee. If you. If you want.”

The corner of Minho’s lips pull up, and it takes Gally an embarrassing few seconds to realize he is smiling. At him, of all people. Minho does help himself to breakfast and coffee, and the smell of the hot beverage does not make him sick, he finds, but wakes him up just a little more. Minho sits himself down opposite Gally, closing his eyes and letting the warm sunlight wash over him. His face has colour, and he looks awake and healthy, even a bit ethereal. Gally hates him a bit.

“How come you’re all spick and span?” He glowers. He has his face resting in his palm, about an inch from the table top.

Minho peeks one eye open, smirking, “Because I didn’t get disgustingly wasted. Unlike some people.”

“How?” Gally demands.

Minho seems uneasy for a millisecond but recovers fast. “I … don’t exactly drink anymore.”

Oh. “Why?”

“Well,” Minho exhales through his nose, fingers drumming the table lightly, “My, um. I don’t remember a lot of things when I’m drunk. Like, really drunk. Everything blacks out to a point.”

 _Oh_. 

Gally’s heart sinks. He has never discussed this with anyone, the concept of memory with him is a touchy subject, but he realizes there are all of two other people who truly understand, anymore. One of which is sitting right here. Gally scratches at his jaw.

“How is … that?”

Minho looks at his coffee. “Okay, I guess. Things pop up randomly. The other day I remembered the class I was in, in grade three, but no idea what school. Or where.” He takes a short sip of his coffee. “I remember a girl. I think she lived across the street. Always in a blue dress. I, um.” He pauses, “I look like my mom.”

He looks sad, and Gally can almost see the images flashing in his eyes, certain ones he is purposely keeping to himself, “Just lots of random shit, man.”

Gally fiddles with his water, “Yeah.”

“Dad was Korean. I know that much.  _No idea_  where I grew up, though. None.” He scoffs. “I can remember what the kid across the road looked like but shuck me if I know the name of the street.”

“Texas,” Gally states, absently.

Minho furrows his eyebrows, “What?”

“Houston, Texas. Where I lived … before.”

Minho looks astonished, “Wow. That’s really cool. How long …?”

“A couple weeks ago.”

“Ah,” Minho drawls, “When you were brooding.”

Gally glares, the action causing a spike of pain in his temple, “I was not – Anyway. Yes. Texas. Don’t ask for anything more specific.”

“Cross my heart.” Minho sits back, tilting his head, “I always thought you had an accent, but couldn’t …” he presses his lips.  _Great_ , Gally thinks. He’ll be conscious of that now.

And he continues. He doesn’t know why, but talking to someone feels nice, as opposed to being talked at.

Talking to Minho.

“My dad was someone in the Military. The Navy, I think. I remember a Port. A lot of it,” he drones. “There’s always this man in a blue uniform. He looked … in power.”

Minho hums. “The Navy, huh.” He gets this mischievous gleam in his eye then, and lips pull into a grin. “ _Aye aye, Captain_.” 

Gally puts every weapon he can into the glare he shoots, then. “Do not.”

Minho bursts. He throws his head back and a loud, exultant laugh engulfs the small kitchen, a bit too loud. Gally shakes his head but feels his mouth twitching. He calms down eventually, only to see the pure irritation written on Gally’s face, and starts up again. Gally swears at him, obnoxious and rude, but it does nothing to cease the laughter. Gally takes a huge gulp of water, feeling a lot better, and Minho wipes at his eyes.

Gally tells him to finish his breakfast. Minho snickers into his mug.

 

 

If the next day Thomas remembers Gally drunkenly trying to kiss him, he doesn’t mention it. Ever. Which is fine, honestly – this is one memory Gally is purposely trying to repress. He helps out wherever Thomas tells him to, not quite ready to return to the building yet. He helps Frypan with the storage (Minho gives him his own special place to work, far away from other people. “Just in case you decide to have another psychotic episode.” Gally  _decides_  to kick Minho in the ass) and he packs boxes for most days until Thomas approaches him and asks if he would be able to work on maintenance.

Which, essentially, just means showing up to whiny Munie’s houses whenever they have a “problem” with plumbing, or there is a hole in a wall or something. For two weeks Gally patches and repairs, and tapes up plumbing that pretty much only holds together with sheer will and imagination. 

The large drawn-up calendar on the vast cafeteria wall tells him that they are approximately one week into May. Despite summer being deathly close, it has been raining on and off for some time, much to the delight of the farmers. Beth gives him an award-winning told-you-so smirk and it weirds Gally the hell out.

He asks her how she knew that would happen, to which she shrugs and says, “Russian climate.”

 

 

Ira isn’t mad about Gally blatantly ignoring him for nearly two months, apparently. Not too much. Gally shows up at his door on Saturday, apology speech in mind, but it turns out he doesn’t need it. Ira answers his door, looking bored. He sees Gally standing there and his eyes widen.

“Hey, stranger,” he says. Gally suppresses a wince.

“Hey,” Gally mutters and clears his throat, “You have any plans tonight?”

Ira glances around, leaning on the door frame. He is bathed in yellow light from the hallway, making his skin look even more golden brown. “Uhh …” He gives Gally a strange stare, and Gally nearly slams his head into the wall.

“Oh my god. I’m not asking you on a shucking date.”

Ira laughs proudly, “I’m just messing with you, man.” He quirks an eyebrow pointedly, “That’s what you get for ignoring me for weeks. Anyway – No, I’m not doing anything. Why?”

Gally grumbles, but says anyway, “I’m on my way to a party, and I was wondering if you wanted to join?”

Ira looks amazed. “A party?  _You_  at a  _party?_ ” He mocks.

“Shut up. Do you wanna come or not?”

Ira chuckles. “Sure, why not.” 

Week after week the number of Munies at these parties has doubled since the beginning. So much so, they had to move into a bigger cabin to accommodate, and the sound of rowdy teenagers is heard almost all the way from the village centre. What sounds like pots and pans are being used as makeshift drum kits, and as they approach Gally sees a group of people laughing and chatting away on the porch, glasses clinking.

Beside him, Ira groans.  “I feel like I’m in high school again.”

Gally snorts. “That’s  _right_. I always forget you’re old.”

Ira elbows him in the ribs. “Shut up.” For someone who acts sixteen all the time, it’s easy to forget that Ira is nearly twenty-three.

“It’s because you’re short,” Gally says.

“You wanna go?” Case and point. “I’m  _sorry_  I don’t measure up to your T-Rex stature. Plus!” He enunciates. “You’re all bones. I can totally take you.”

Gally raises his hands. “Alright, alright. Whatever you say.”

They make their way into the cabin and are immediately assaulted by questionable, oily fumes that are enough to make both of them stagger back.

Ira plugs his nose. “Ugh, God!”

Gally pulls him into the next room, thankfully with marginally crisper air. They help themselves to starter drinks and Ira catches him up on the building process, asking Gally when he was planning on coming back, if at all.

Gally tells him, “Soon.” And doesn’t mention that the main reason he hasn’t done so by now is that he was being a coward about facing him.

Beth saunters into view about an hour or so into the festivities, and, as Beth and Ira engage in a conversation that wouldn’t have been as exciting a couple drinks ago, Gally definitely does not scan the room to see if he can spot Minho anywhere.

Who he does spot is Frypan, two other Gladers, that Group B boy, and tries very much  _not_  to notice Thomas’s included absence. He carries this thought with him as he drains his glass and refills it, drains that one immediately after and everything takes on that familiar hazy glow. With liquor comes paranoid jealousy, apparently, and Gally attempts to do nothing about this. He is making his way into the back porch for some air when some Munie approaches him with a plate full of strange brown rectangular things.

“Hey, man!” he half-shouts at Gally, succeeding in getting his attention, and thrusts the plate toward him. “Want one?”

Gally frowns at him, then at the whatever-the-hell’s, and back at him. The guy nods solemnly.

“Ye _eeah_ , I think you do.”

“What the hell are they?” Gally deadpans.

“What?” It is now the Munie’s turn to frown in confusion, “Brownies, man.”

Gally shakes his head, and the guy gives him a kind of knowing look he decides he doesn’t like. At all. “Ahh. You’re one of  _them_ , aren’t you?” he says.

Something cold and unpleasant sprouts to life inside Gally, and he cocks his head, “Excuse me?” Some ways behind the Munie he sees Ira watching him wearily over Beth’s shoulder.

The Munie ignores him, “Seriously, take one, dude. Put a spring in your step.” He winks, and Gally intentionally maintains eye contact while taking the offered baked goods. The guy gives a slight awkward wave and takes off down the hall. He sees Ira say something to Beth out of the corner of his eye.

Suppressing the confrontational shiver that has made its way up his spine Gally takes a bite of the brownie. It tastes horrible. He takes another bite to make sure. Yep, definitely horrible. He seriously doesn’t know why the idiot was talking them up so much and thinks about throwing it into the lake as he is swallowing the last bite.

Gally finally makes it out onto the porch, and the night air enters his lungs. It is as if cool liquid is entering his bloodstream, making everything seem calmer, more beautiful. Gally throws his head back, grasps the bannister for support, and just  _feels_. Leaves tumble through the gentle breeze, it giving off a faint purple hue. He finds himself laughing as it dances around itself, and crickets chirp yellow in the bushes, loud and pulsing, like organic music. He feels tranquil and solemn, yet every cell in his body is in motion, and Gally is walking back into the house. He runs into someone in the hall, laughs and jogs past. The walls glow a deep blue.

He finds the bathroom, decides that the tub looks pretty comfortable for a ceramic dome, and jumps in. He almost falls twice but manages the third time, lounging back and swinging his too long legs over the brim, humming in contentment. Gally looks at his right arm, turns it over and searches for a small little scar on his upper forearm. He locates it easy enough – it is round and about the size of his fingernail, with small hairlines like cracks opening from the centre and fading out. In a way, it looks somewhat like a tiny sun, forever imprinted into Gally’s skin. 

For a reason or two Gally expects it to sting when he touches it. It does not do that at all. What happens is a low green light pulses from his fingertip at the point of impact. Intrigued, Gally does it again, and sure enough, that same pulsing light washes over his forearm. He laughs once, astonished, and touches other areas of his body just to see. Wherever he touches drums green for a moment, flooding out and dispersing. Fascinating. Gally claps and a large circle of light pulses, contracts and expands, like his own, tiny supernova in the palms of his hands.

He does this again and again, for six, seven, eight times in a row. The ninth time the green light fades and his palms come back red.

The red is not a beautiful beam of colour, but hot, thick liquid. Gally’s heart stammers and he wipes at the blood. It drips down his forearms, and the harder he rubs, scratches, wipes, the more it spreads. It is up to his shoulders now, soaking through his jacket and shirt and spreading down to his jeans.

Gally is hysterical – slapping at his arms and chest, shouting. His lips are forming words, but he cannot hear his voice over the loud drum beat in his head, rising higher. He thinks he is saying “No!” over and over like a mantra. His vision blurs, and his heart is pounding in his chest. He can’t breathe. Gally tries to climb out of the bathtub, but his hands slip, and red stains the white ceramic.

“Please –  _please_ ,” he’s saying, shouting, whispering, he doesn’t know. Gally stupidly touches his face, and the blood spreads there, too. He possibly screams.

Right then he feels a hand on his shoulder, and he thinks someone is calling his name, shouting it. Gally can’t see anything; everything is too much of a blur and his eyes sting horribly. The hand on his shoulder grips firm, shaking him, and finally, he manages to look up and see a pair of dark, very concerned eyes.

Gally is aware now that he is hyperventilating, however, his vision clears, and he hears a voice that sounds like Frypan’s yelling, “The shuck is wrong with him?”

A lower voice, closer to Gally, is repeating his name, and saying, “Calm down. Hey, can you hear me? Gally?  _Gally_.”

A small crowd has gathered by the door, of which Frypan is shouting at to “get the shuck out”. There is some protesting before a new set of footsteps bound into the room, and Gally hears Ira ask, “Is he alright?”

“Who the hell are you?” Minho snaps, and not waiting for a reply, says, “Does he  _look_  alright!”

“Get it off!” Gally cries, furious at all the voices, “Just get it off! It won’t come off!  _It won’t come off!_ ”

“What won’t come off?”

“He’s trippin’ out, or something, man –”

“I  _know_. Gally!”

Gally slaps hopelessly at his arms, panting, feeling as if he’s about to pass out just as someone grabs his face and forces him to look at them. Minho’s eyes stare deep and intense into his – wide and searching and so,  _so_  concerned. There are purple sparks dancing in the air around them.

“Shit,” Minho hisses, dreadfully, “He’s had  _something_.” A thumb on his jaw moves in a soft, circular motion.

 _It’s all over me,_  Gally thinks. He clenches his fist around the fabric of Minho’s sleeve.  _Please, get it off, please, please –_

“I, um.” Ira stutters, “I saw him take a brownie from this guy before.”

Minho glares up, “A what?”

“A brownie. It’s a kind of … Look, anyway. They’re usually laced with pot, but – that’s a, ah, plant that –”

“I don’t care. Get to the point.”

Gally’s head pounds. He lets it fall onto Minho’s shoulder. The blood amazingly does not seep on to him. He thinks he can feel fingers move across his scalp.

“Okay. Well, they really shouldn’t be making him act like  _that_ , unless. Unless they were mixed with something else.”

He can hear Minho’s heartbeat, a furious rhythm in his chest. Minho takes a deep breath and exhales steadily through his nose. Gally can feel it in his hair. It feels like autumn leaves, teetering before a snow storm.

“Mixed with what?” Frypan asks.

“I have no idea, I’m not an expert on this. Really.”

Gally whines, burying his face deeper. “I’m sorry,” he repeats, over and over. The blood in the bathtub rises, and Gally freaks, clutching at Minho, at the brim, desperately trying to climb out. He puts pressure on Minho, who catches himself before toppling over, and steadies Gally’s shaking hand, arms, body. Soon Gally is being lifted out of the tub enough to swing his legs over and collapse against the cool tile. He clutches at his pounding skull, still keeping his fist clenched tightly in Minho’s shirt.

Out in the hall, someone who sounds a whole lot like Beth is interrogating a large group of people, and Frypan talks softly to someone else by the door.

“Who did you see?” Minho speaks so softly. Not once taking his eyes off Gally that for a moment, Ira doesn’t realize that he is talking to him at first. 

“I don’t know him, but I can point his face out to you.”

“Yes.” Minho nods, finally breaking eye contact and looking at Frypan, now joined by Thomas, at the door. The purple sparks are disturbed by the movement and flare out on the air. Gally notices faintly that the green light is back, and it pulses coolly where Minho’s hand is grasping his arm.

“Can you take him outside?” and then, “You – let’s go.”

There is much shuffling, and Minho reluctantly releases Gally – who more than reluctantly lets go of his shirt – and bounds out of the room, Ira following close at his heels. Gally starts when Frypan and Thomas lift him to stand.

“Easy, easy, man,” Frypan murmurs, then, to Thomas, “He looks green.”

Thomas shifts his balance, allowing Gally to lean most of his weight on to him, “Let’s just get him out of here.”

Eventually, amazingly, they make it outside (Gally staggers and nearly throws up twice on the journey).The lights on the porch pulse, just like the entire world – imploding. Exploding. Rinse and repeat.  They take him over to some moderately quiet corner, where the breeze hits his face, cool and gentle, and Gally leans his head against a wooden column on the porch. He is faintly aware of yelling in the distance just as Thomas groans, tells Frypan he’ll be back, and takes off down the front of the house to where a small crowd is gathered.

“What’s happening?” Gally slurs. He blinks, trying to still his vision, but the crickets are too vivid for him to be able to see anything clearly.

“Erm,” Frypan mumbles, unsure. Gally tells him to tell the crickets to stop dancing, and he nods, “I will, buddy.” 

Gally clutches his head and groans, barely has enough time to warn, “I don’t feel well,” before emptying the contents of his stomach over the railing. Frypan lays a hand on his centre-back until he is done, then carefully manoeuvres him to take a seat on the steps. It is only then that Gally notices all the blood on him is gone – it trails away in the wind in black and gray sparks, and Gally drops his head on to his knees in relief.

“It’s gone.” He says, “Finally, finally …”

“What’s gone?” Frypan asks, confused yet distracted. The shouting gets louder. This catches Gally’s attention and he doesn’t reply. Someone moves out of the way, and he sees Minho’s figure standing close to another, in their face, snarling. He is moving forward, and the other moving back, evasive. He sees Thomas by Minho’s shoulder, on guard, ready to pounce in a second. Ira stands beside them wearily, his face so serious it makes Gally laugh.

The scene is alight with a spectrum of colours, and Gally leans against Frypan, dizzy.

Then the scene wavers, and they are standing in a strange warehouse, cold and steel-gray, and then Minho is swinging forward, his fist connecting to the Munie’s face –

And Gally is on the ground, Thomas’s fists landing crushing punches, relentless and unyielding –

The spectators gasp and jump back as the Munie hits the ground hard, and Thomas shouts, lunging forward and grasping his friend by the middle, pulling him back –

Thomas’s arms and legs are flailing in the air, and it takes both Minho and Newt to hold him back, and he is screaming so loud and with so much rage and –

“That’s enough!” Thomas screams. He swings Minho around, putting distance between him and the Munie, who has blood pooling from his nose now –

There is blood.  _So much blood_. 

Minho struggles, but Thomas never yields, talking fast in his ear, just as Gally’s vision wavers. Frypan is a tense, solid form at his back. His head drops forward, and he groans.

“Gal?” Frypan pipes up, reaching out to keep him upright. “Gally, hey!”

Gally passes out at his feet.

 

 

The next morning feels all too familiar even before Gally manages to crack an eye open. His head is a crescendo of drumming beats, like a marching band. He remembers he saw one once. It was horrendous. 

His body feels heavy, his mind heavier. The room is blurry when he finally opens his eyes, and morning light is streaming through the gaped curtains in hot ribbons. If Gally could have frowned without setting off a migraine he would have. He never, not once since he has been here, shut the curtains. They are always open to allow for easy view to the outside. He tried closing them once and spent three hours staring at the burnt orange fabric in irrational paranoia, claustrophobic, and reopened them. He fell asleep watching the stars.

Hissing, Gally rises to one elbow, spotting a glass of water sitting atop the small table, as well as some white pills. His sheets are bunched at the end of the bed and Gally kicks out, still half asleep, finds that the lump of blankets is faintly human-sized and has a voice.    

The voice shouts, “ _Ow!_ ” very loud, and very offended, and for a moment Gally considers hiding under the covers and pretending he has no idea what happened. If, say, he wasn’t (probably) eighteen years old.

Minho pops his head up to glare at Gally, eyebrows stitched together, sleep still in his eyes.

“The shuck you do that for!” He snarls, albeit sluggish.

Gally doesn’t know how to respond. His head swims like a mother and hiding under the sheets is still Plan A. His voice squeaks when he tries to speak, throat dry. Of course it does. 

“Um,” Gally clears his throat, “What are you doing?” The words  _In my bed_  trail off in the air and leave a clenching feeling in his lower stomach.

“Sleeping. Or I  _was_.” Minho rubs at his face groggily and gives Gally a look up and down, “Whatever. Anyway – how are you?”

Gally uses his weak limbs to push himself into an upright position. Stars swim in his vision and he rakes his fingers through his hair, feeling ghosts from the night before. His head drops to his knee, and Gally decides groaning is the most adequate response he could offer right now.

“Rrright,” Minho drawls. Gally feels the mattress dip when he reaches for something off to the side, and then he is getting water and two pills shoved at him.

“Here,” Minho says, voice surprisingly soft, and Gally notices his hair covers most of his left eye, “Take these.” Gally is glaring at them suspiciously and Minho sighs, “Aspirins. They help with the pain.” He raises an eyebrow, “Trust me?”

Yes, he thinks. He does trust Minho. Absolutely, even after all this time. Gally is just not sure if he is okay with that fact or not. Regardless, he takes the aspirins, downs them without water, but drinks the cupful afterwards anyway, for his throat.

He gulps, “I know what aspirins are.” and hands the cup back to a sceptical Minho.

“Not feeling sick?”

“Nope.” Weirdly enough. He taps his forehead, “Kills, though.”

Minho hums. “Yeah, well. Your friend …” There is a tone of distaste in Minho’s voice and it is Gally’s turn to raise an eyebrow, “He said that you ‘wouldn’t feel sick so much this morning, not like before’.” He rolls his eyes and Gally bites back a smirk. “Those brownies that slinthead was handin’ around had that pot thing in it, some other shit I didn’t catch … and an alteration of the Bliss.”

Gally snaps his head up, ludicrously. This earns a spark of pain in his temple, “ _That_  did not feel like Bliss to me.”

Minho leans back on his palms, “Hey, that’s just what I was told, man.” Then he sighs and collapses back against the bed, sinking into the pillows, “Last night was hell, so if it’s okay with you I’m just gonna keep sleeping. Good that?”

Gally watches Minho lounging on his sheets, looking comfortable and soft, his hair a mess and clothes rumbled, and he has never wanted to stay under the covers all day more. But his bones are too stiff, and he really needs to pee, so Gally just sighs, “Sure.”

“Cool.” Minho sounds appreciative – however, since he is already in the process of falling back asleep it’s hard to tell. He is quiet for a while, save for relaxed breathing, and when Gally thinks he has fallen asleep he tries to climb out of bed.

Then Minho says, “Why do you sleep like that, anyway?”

Gally’s limbs are exhausted, but the aspirins are kicking in, thank fuck. He smoothes his hair back. “I don’t know. I …” he turns and looks back at Minho, “I can’t sleep any other way,” he murmurs.

Minho hums a laugh, “You should work on that.”

Gally says sarcastically, “Are you going to help me?” before he hears the soft snoring coming from the boy in his bed. Minho rolls on to his stomach, clutching one of the pillows to his chest. The image emits thoughts and memories Gally has tried to let go of long ago, so he turns away before unwanted emotions can creep into his chest.

Before leaving he notices that his jacket, shoes and pants have been removed. He most certainly does not blush, no way in Hell.

 

 

He doesn’t feel the need to throw up this morning and heads for the kitchen straight after. Gally doesn’t notice the girl on his couch until she speaks.

“Making a habit of this, huh?”

Gally nearly walks into the kitchen table. He grabs the end of it for support while the other hand flies to his knife-less hip. His heart pounds almost as bad as his head, and he turns whilst clutching at his rib cage.

“Oh my god, Beth!”

Beth gives him a look, feigning innocence. She is casually lounged on his sofa, legs crossed, steaming mug and all. Gally waits for his blood pressure to drop before inquiring what the hell she is doing in his house – it is also around the time he remembers he is not wearing any pants, and subtly side steps behind a chair. “How did you get in here?” He hisses, suddenly aware of the ears in the next room.

She shrugs, taking a sip, “I might have picked your lock. Hope you don’t mind.”

It’s not that Gally does not  _not_  mind, it’s just that he honestly doesn’t have the physical and mental energy to argue with Beth, nor does he think he ever will.

He finds himself repeating, “Sure,” and it tastes like a life sentence. Beth seems satisfied and drinks her coffee, and Gally leans against the counter, watching him curiously.

“Well. Are you?”

“Am I what?”

“Are you going to make a habit of this?” She waves a hand. “Getting plastered every weekend.”

They compete in a staring competition for some moments.

“I don’t know,” Gally answers eventually, “Maybe not. No. Who knows.”

Beth hums curiously. Sip.

“It wasn’t actually my fault this time,” Gally argues, crossing his arms.

“Yeah.” She muses, “I guess not. Are you going to accept food from questionable sticks any time soon, or ever again?”

Gally stares. Takes a deep breath. Stares some more. “Are you lecturing me?”

“ _No_.” Beth downs the rest of her coffee and sets the empty mug on the table. She props her elbow on the armrest, pushing long dark locks off her face, and looks up at Gally, “I am just asking you some questions I’m curious about the answers to, is all.”

Then, “Don’t be a baby.”

And Gally groans, rolling his eyes, because what was he expecting? He shakes his head and goes to fill a glass of water, which of course is when Minho decides to enter the room.

“Hey, Gally, did you – um.” Minho breaks mid-stride into the living room, spotting Beth, whose face lights up in surprised delight. 

The dark circles under Minho’s eyes, coupled with a look of restlessness, is almost enough for Gally to forget the impending mortification.

“Erm.” Minho mumbles, absently moving his hair back. The air in the room thickens, and he gives a faint side glance over to Gally.

“Minho,” Gally sighs, “this is Beth. Beth, Minho.”

“Hi.” Beth tilts her head, giving him an award-winning grin.

“Hey,” Minho replies. He remains standoffish yet curious, reminding Gally of a rabbit.

“You needed something?” Gally asks, his voice an octave louder than necessary, but it serves to break Minho out of whatever inquisitive trance he was in. He turns his attention back to Gally.

“Uh, no. Nah. You look fine,” he says awkwardly, “So, yeah. Listen. I’m gonna go and, er. See you later?”

Gally feels the sprout in his chest grow steadily more, “Yeah.”

“Good,” Minho murmurs. He offers a small – most shocking about all of this – polite smile to Beth before leaving.

Beth waits for the click of the front door closing shut to cock with her head in the direction where Minho stood a moment before and says, “You hitting that?”

Gally blanches, “Oh my god.”

 

 

Gally’s response to that  _inquiry_ was a simple, “No,” to which Beth followed up with “Why not?”. Gally then proceeded in dropping his head onto the kitchen counter, which, ultimately, was cause for more aspirin. Which he did not have.  Which meant going to Minho’s house and asking for more, but, yeah. No. Irritating need to see Minho all ruffled from sleep again, be damned.

He goes to Ira instead. (He gets shut down, though, for having already taken two pills not too long ago). So Gally suffers through the morning with a throbbing forehead and weary eyes and tries to figure out what the hell he is going to do on nobody-gives-a-flying-fuck-the-world-may-as-well-be-burning-and-it-is Sunday. He walks the entirety of the village as well as its perimeter, the entire while feeling unsatisfied and cheated in some way, and finds himself in front of Minho’s cabin before the morning is over, with only a small sense of having gotten there.

He expects Thomas to open the door, but instead receives a shout of “It’s open!” in Minho’s smooth voice from somewhere in the house. Raising a slightly concerned eyebrow Gally turns the knob and gently swings the door open. His first impressions of the house, walking through the threshold, are that is it cleaner than he expected. It is also a hell of a lot more lived in and inviting than Gally’s cold and sparse home, which just barely deserves the term. Gally finds Minho lounging on a small green sofa in the living room, scribbling onto a book. Resting on a coffee table is a small stack of papers, which upon closer inspection, are filled with rushed chicken scratch and strange diagrams and drawings.

Minho’s expression when he decides to look up is surprised that Gally is there, yet not  _totally_  against it, to which Gally counts as a small win. “Hey,” he says, pen pausing at a random point on the page.

“Do you always keep your door unlocked?” is out before the logical portion of Gally’s brain can wrestle the marginally larger paranoid side away from his mouth. 

Minho squints his eyes. “No …?” He drawls. “Thomas went out earlier. Aren’t you supposed to be sleeping?”

Gally eyes the stack of papers. “Aren’t you?”

“Didn’t feel up to it, in the end.” He stretches, yawning obnoxiously. His t-shirt rides up and reveals a sliver of skin, “Those are Thomas’s, by the way,” Minho says defensively and gestures down to the mindless scribbles. Gally thinks he sees constellations in the corner.

“The hell are they?” He asks.

“Memories,” Minho answers simply, and Gally suddenly feels gross and invasive. Minho shakes his head and returns to whatever he was writing, “No idea why he leaves them there. Maybe it’s his way of asking me to try and make sense of whatever goes on in that head of his because shuck knows he can’t.”

Minho takes on a begrudged tone toward the end, and Gally doesn’t want to ask. He moves over to the couch – Minho slides his feet up to make room, not once do his eyes leave the page – and settles into the cushions. He thinks this is a lot more comfortable than his own couch. Maybe it’s all the upholstery?

“You keep a journal?”

“You have a problem with that?”

“No,” Gally says quickly, “I don’t.”

Minho shrugs, “Old habits.”

It makes sense, Gally thinks. The same kind of sense it made that Gally immediately navigated toward the building reconstruction when they arrived in Paradise. (He cringes at the thought of having to document every second of the day like Minho used to have to, then draw a map about it).

“How’s the head now?” Minho nods his chin up in gesture.

“Foggy. But I’ll live.”

Minho makes a show of sighing dramatically. “Oh, thank god! That’s such a relief!”

Gally shoves his knee once, “Slim it. I know you mean that for real.”

Minho snorts but tries to hold in a grin.

The scratch of pen on paper is the only sound for some minutes, and then, “How do these people survive taking a day off?” Gally groans, “My brain is melting.”

Minho hums in agreement. Gally is almost painfully aware of his feet resting lightly on his leg, with no intention of moving anytime soon. The skin of his thigh, through denim, tingles faintly.

“Are  _you_  doing anything today?”

Minho’s pen pauses in the centre of the page. “I’m heading out around lunchtime, soon as Thomas gets back …” he glances at the clock on the wall above a mantelpiece, toes wiggling absently against Gally’s thigh.

“O-kay.” Gally sounds out, distracted with how Minho scratches a short line, glaring at his notebook with a worried crease in his brow.

“What is it?” He asks, cautiously.

Minho finally looks at him, sighs, and closes his book and sets it aside, “I called him ‘Tommy’ this morning. It just came out and he …” Minho punches the cushion, “It was like drawing a curtain and turning out all the lights. He just shut off.” He looks Gally in the eye, “I mean – you know how he gets. You’ve seen it, right?” His eyes say  _tell me I’m not crazy_.

Gally nods. He most certainly has, and it isn’t pretty. Too close to his scattered memory of Thomas, than the boy from the maze. The boy after the maze is a balance of the two, which isn’t ideal, in Gally’s personal opinion. But better.

Minho picks at a stitch in the fabric. “I hate it.” He says, “I hate  _more_  that I don’t know what to do when it happens. He goes “I’m going for a run” and leaves and I’m just standing there like a dumb shank.”

“That’s, um. Expected,” Gally offers lamely. Comfort isn’t exactly his forte, either. Minho huffs in a “no shit” kind of way. “He’ll be …”

He can’t say  _alright,_ because Gally isn’t sure any of them will be truly alright.

“He’ll be.”

Minho locks eyes with him, eyes swimming with so many more emotions than Gally is used to seeing on him, besides the usual detached anger and sarcasm and passive aggression. Gally’s attention is drawn to his leg and, without thinking or giving himself time to chicken out, Gally slowly places a hand atop of Minho’s knee. He doesn’t flinch away as he thought that he would have – as if he is breaking some unwritten code that they only lay a finger on each other when Gally is off with the fairies. Minho stares at Gally’s hand on his knee with a misplaced expression, sighing softly through his nose.

Sunlight shines on Minho’s face, making him look warm and comfortable, making Gally just want to reach out and – 

“Thanks.” Minho smiles, looking at Gally with heavy-lidded eyes and dark circles, and it sounds like he is saying so much more.

He leaves his hand there a little longer, feeling the toned muscle under his palm, and clears his throat for lack of anything better. There is an awkward silence that follows that leaves Gally thinking up various lines of conversation in his head, each one lamer than the last when Minho springs up.

He jolts on the couch, staring at the clock on the wall. “Shit, what time is it?” Legs swing to the floor, and Gally finds himself missing the warmth.

“Er.” He squints, “11:42?”

Minho swears again. He stands up, ducks over to the corner of the room and pulls out a medium-sized blue pack and immediately places his notebook and pen inside of it, first.

“Was s’posed to meet up at half-past!” Minho’s rushed ramble fluctuates in volume as he runs from the living room to the kitchen. Gally hears the sound of the fridge opening and closing at lightning speed and he stands just as Minho ever-so-gracefully bounds back into the room, hair sticking up.

“You going on a hike?” Gally asks, placing his hands in his pockets.

“Sort off …” Minho drawls distractedly, packing this and that into his bag. “We’re going to scout the area. Because, you know, we’re here but we’re not exactly  _here_  until we have completely checked out the place – outside and all, apparently.” He looks up at Gally, shrugging. A strand of ebony sticks to his forehead already. “Down to the  _leaf_ , dude.”

Gally raises an eyebrow.  _Doesn’t that sound familiar_. Minho shoots him a look of exasperated agreement, reading his mind. He says, “Thomas is already there, I hope …” and then zips up the travel bag, and swings it over one shoulder he pads down the pockets of his trousers.

“I guess we never really did quit our day jobs, huh?” Minho jokes. Gally doesn’t decide if it is funny or not, yet it is cruel in its irony.

He stares at his hands, callused from years of building and repairing so that a few dozen boys can feel just that tiny bit more comfortable in a world they don’t understand. “Guess not,” he says.

Gally expects Minho to leave then, walk out the door with nothing more than a “Later, shank!”, but instead, he loiters in the centre of the room, chewing on his lip.

Gally waits for him to speak. He does not. Gally says, “It’s 11:50.”

And Minho says, “Yeah.”

And Gally says, “You were late, right?”

“Yes, I know. Okay. Shut up a minute.” Gally makes a point of pressing his lips. Minho rolls his eyes, “Okay. Um, look. I don’t know how long I’ll be gone exploring shuck knows where, and …”

Gally smirks, cocking his head, “Are you going to miss me?”

Minho laughs once, shaking his head incredibly. “ _No_. I’m –” Minho’s tone falls flat, and that former look in his eye returns, “I am  _not_  going to miss dragging your drunken ass home every week, that’s for sure –“

“Aw, it's cute that you worry.”

“ _Which_ ,” Minho raises his voice over Gally's, glaring, “is what I wanted to mention ... Be careful, okay? No more shucking brownies.”

Gally inwardly groans, “Shuck. I’m never going to live this down, am I?”

“That’s not … what I’m talking about.”

Gally pauses. “What then?” he asks, carefully.

“Just –” Minho looks uncomfortable. The little crease between his eyebrows is back and it makes Gally want to reach forward and smooth it away. He keeps his feet firmly planted. “Look,” he begins, “I wasn’t going to say anything, but that dude tried to get me to take one, and Thomas almost did before I stopped him.  There was just something  _off_  about that guy I couldn’t place, man.” He looks at Gally, “Until I saw you tripping out in the bathroom.”

Gally stares at him, eyes narrowed in thought. “Why?” He says, antsy. 

Minho shrugs. “Why? Shuck, I don’t know.  _Maybe_  –” Minho steps closer, adjusting the shoulder strap “– because all those Munies are thousands of miles from home and they’re scared, and really shucking pissed. And looking for someone to blame. Which is us, on most counts.” He fixes Gally with an incredulous stare like  _c’mon, man_ , “We’re far from getting marriage proposals.”

Gally sighs. He knows that. He is aware that people sometimes stare at him like a dissected rat in a lab. His little fit at the crops that day didn’t do much to help the situation, amazingly.

Minho must see something in his expression because he immediately backtracks. “Shuck. I knew I shouldn’t have told you.”

“Shouldn’t have told me?” Gally snaps, “I got shucking  _spiked_  and you  _shouldn’t have told me_?”

“Gally,” Minho says, tone warning.

“No, no. It’s okay. It’s not a shucking Griever or Bigfoot –”

“I didn’t say that –”

“– So no big deal!”

“Ga _lly_.” Minho sighs. He picks at his bag, “Look, just. Just calm down, okay? Please?”

Minho’s eyes are dark and intense and the same deeply concerned look is back. Despite himself, Gally takes a deep breath, forcing his blood to cool. He needs … something. Not coffee or aspirin.  _Something_. Minho's lips are chapped where he’s been chewing on them. He raises his palms. “Calm.”

“Good that.” Minho murmurs. He is standing closer now. Gally can count one, two, three hairs sticking to his forehead. He taps on his thigh for something to do.

“Aren’t you late?”

Minho scratches at his scalp, “We’re not leaving straight away.”

“It’s nearly twelve.”

“I know what time it is,” Minho says. Yet he stays put, staring blankly at a spot on the window pane, fingers fidgeting. Then he laughs, and he sounds so exhausted Gally feels a little bad. “Honestly, between you and Thomas, it’s a damn wonder I haven’t keeled over yet from stress …”

Gally shrugs, “That’s your own fault, man.”

Minho glares, “If I come back and someone’s on their death bed, I will  _personally_  –”

Gally cuts him off with a bitter laugh, “The only shank who’ll be on their death bed is me when Ira finally manages to  _talk_  me six feet under.”

If Gally had blinked he would have missed the dark look which passed over Minho’s face, his jaw setting. Gally squints at him, and almost considers saying “Ira” one more time to see if the window will explode with the sheer force of Minho’s scowl.

Instead, he says, “Fine. I promise,” and raises a hand mockingly, “Wanna pinky swear on it?”

Minho upturns his mouth sourly, however, it doesn’t quite reach his eyes, which have simmered down in heat. His hair slips from its secure place behind his ear – it’s getting long, too, “You are still a dick, no matter what anyone says.”

Gally blinks at him incredulously, “People have said differently?”

Minho rolls his eyes, and in short says, “Frypan,” like it explains everything. 

Gally presses his lips, trying not to smile like an idiot. (Which he has had to do a lot recently. It’s horrifying). His eyes flit down Minho’s face and with his fingers itching in annoyance, informs, “You have hair in your mouth.”

“Hm?” Minho raises his brows, swiping at his cheek. Gally signs and steps closer.

“And everywhere. Would it shucking kill you to keep your hair out of your shucking eyes? –”

Minho groans, “This again.” 

“ _How_  do you not run into walls every five minutes?”

“Because I'm shucking  _magical_ , that's how ...”

Minho goes still the second Gally’s hand touches his face, fingers swiping along his forehead, moving dark locks to the side. Gally is realizing that he is standing as close as he was that day in the field, albeit to the livid fire filling Minho's entire form, and is mostly aware of his own pounding heartbeat and how – just like that day – Minho’s eyes travel to his mouth and darken. He moves, fingers weaving through hair, across his scalp, lightly, and before his brain can catch up with his body Gally leans forward and kisses him.

It’s stiff and a little awkward and Gally isn’t entirely sure what to do with his other hand, the one not currently in Minho’s hair (God he had forgotten how soft it is) and he doesn’t exactly remember how to kiss properly, how to move, when to move (it’s been ages,  _shuck_ ) –

But then Minho groans, half moaning into his mouth, softly, and pushes forward. His fists tighten around the fabric of Gally’s t-shirt and he tilts his head for a better angle, and whatever is left of Gally’s mind says,  _Oh, yeah, that’s right_ and moves with him. His free hand finds Minho’s hip while the other travels down to the nape of his neck, pulling him closer.

The familiarity and longing and the feeling of finally finding something you didn’t know you missed that much (so much) wells up in his chest, and he deepens the kiss, sighing. Minho tilts his chin and Gally's mouth opens, pulling him even closer still, and feels the faint tickle of Minho's tongue on the roof of his mouth.

It is all almost too much – the feeling of having Minho pressed up against him, every single inch touching, that it’s too soon when he pulls away, breathless, cheeks flushed.

Minho’s hands rest locked tight around Gally’s waist, Gally’s own now settled on his shoulders, too comfortable to move, that he can’t even force himself to look at the clock. It is terrible when eventually Minho says, “I have to go.”

His voice serves to jolt Gally from his delirium. He watches reality slowly creep back into Minho’s features, and Gally clears his throat.

“Yeah,” he says, feeling Minho’s arms loosen around him. Gally has to bite the inside of his cheek to remind him not to reach out and pull him back, lock him up in his arms, not let go.

“Uh.” Minho looks down, up, pretty much anywhere other than Gally, and he can’t help it, but he thinks back to that morning in the kitchen.

It's a bit like tripping over an inch before the finish line.   

He lets go and stands there, feeling kind of like a slinthead, like he’s gone too far this time, and there is only back peddling from here, and –

Minho is frowning at the wall again, seemingly battling some internal dilemma, before he shakes his head, looks back over at Gally, “Uh, yeah. So I’ll, um. See you when I get back,” he says.

Gally nods. His heart is doing way too many things he really doesn’t want to think about right now because for one agonizing second Minho looks like he is going to kiss him again. But then he is inching toward the door, and Gally will be left alone in his house standing with the ghost of Minho against his lips.

“Sure.”

 

 

Gally goes straight home afterwards, feeling sick in his stomach. Memories crash behind his eyelids, unyielding, for the entire night until he wakes Monday morning feeling worse.

 

 


	2. Chapter 2

 

 

A little time into the week Gally miserably rolls out of bed and begins a slow crawl over to the building site for the sole purpose of telling Phillip that he'd rather stick an entire tree up his ass than lumber one more. Fifty paces away from his home Ira is waiting for him, leaning against a fence and chewing on an apple.

“Hey!” He calls, seeing Gally approach, overhanging storm cloud in tow, “Look who's alive.”

Gally does something that probably could resemble jazz hands, with much less enthusiasm. Ira crunches the last bit off the stalk, cheerfully slam-dunks it into a nearby garbage bin and pushes off the fence.

“I have a surprise for you.”                                                                                                                             

“I'm not in the mood –”

Ira slings an arm out Gally's shoulders, cutting him off, spinning him back down the path he came.

“We're not going to the site today,” Ira announces.

“We're not?” Gally blinks. His throat feels hoarse.

“Nope. We quit.”

“We did?”

“Yes!” He beams, “And I found us a better job. You can thank me later in compliments or sandwiches, or both.”

Gally shakes his head, disbelieving, and shrugs out of his friend's hold, “What do you mean you  _found us a better job?_ ” He snarls, angry that he won' t be able to give Phillip his “Go fuck yourself” speech he had prepared, and demands, “Where?”

What he receives is a mischievous smile in return, and more anger.

“ _That_  is the surprise.”

 

 

The Surprise happens to be three old cars, or what could have been called cars once upon a time,  _maybe_ , but now look closer to death than Gally's felt on his fair share of Sunday Mornings. Ira looks far too proud of himself when he strips the sheet off one of them, an old brown station wagon that could have possibly been blue, lord knows. He emerges in the aftershock of a cloud of thick dust, arms outstretched and wide grin in place, a bit like an annoying, deranged magician, and Gally wonders why he even bothered leaving the house at all. Ira's, “Ta Da!” pierces through his brain, upping his irritability state by ten-fold. They are standing in a kind of smaller bunker type building all the way on the other end of the village.

“The shuck is this?”

“Remember how Gareth couldn't find a key to this place?” Gally doesn't but pretends that he does, along with how he had no idea this building existed until two minutes ago, and who the hell Gareth is.

“Well he did, don't ask me how. And look!” Ira throws the now bundled up dust collector somewhere to the side, “Cars!”

Gally's expression remains the same. Ira sends him a disappointed look.

“I thought you'd be more enthusiastic.” 

There is a cobweb in the corner the size of Gally's couch. He says, “I am bursting with barely concealed excitement.”

Ira sighs, “C'mon, man. We can fix these up and we'll have  _actual transport_ ,” He does a little bounce. “You're always going on about leaving the village and exploring.”

Gally raises an eyebrow. It is very true that he has thought about leaving, though he doesn't recall ever disclosing that information with Ira. Frypan, maybe.

Go to inner St Petersburg, away from the rolling hills and forests and everything labelled “Paradise” in general. Maybe the city? There is something about a bridge in the foreground of his memory. Or the beach.

Yes. The beach. Water. The ocean. Salty air in his lungs, feeling the mild sting of the ocean breeze blowing white sand onto his ankles, and the vast openness. Everywhere. Surrounding. Calm, serene, inviting, engulfing,  _wood under his feet, creaking as he runs, a bright white-flash and panic –_

Gally shakes himself. He realizes that Ira is staring about the same time that he realizes there is stinging behind his eyes. He clears his throat, self-conscious with how it almost sounds like a sob.

“Are you okay?” Ira asks, and it sounds like he is talking about a lot of things. 

Gally refrains from rubbing his eyes. He can't say “no” and he sure as hell can't say “yes” either.

He settles on, “I'm fine.” because it's vague and can mean a whole manner of things, really.  _I'm fine. I do not keep getting these memories of impending doom and depression, and I did not make out with someone I was supposed to be over years ago. And I do_ not _want to do it again, and again, and –_

He scratches at his scalp, doesn't acknowledge Ira's dubious stare.

“Yeah. Fine,” Gally waves a hand at the sad heap of metal, “So the horseless carriages? We doin' something with them?”

Ira lets a beat pass before answering, “Yeah. We're gonna help get them up and running.”

“Cool,” Gally spots a workbench near the spiderweb, “You know how to use any of those?”

“My uncle owned garage. He taught me a thing or two.” Ira bites his lip and stares thoughtfully at the car, “You know how to drive?”

Gally gives him his best _are you stupid?_ glare and Ira has the good nature to look embarrassed. They move on.

Gally watches him run around, take metal off and put metal on for a good hour, passing him whatever tools he needs. If he ever gets any wrong Ira doesn't mention it. Gally retreats for fresh air the first chance he gets. It isn't the greatest working conditions in the world, but it's quiet and open, and he will take Ira's chit-chat over Phillip's barking orders and passive aggression any day. He'll get used to it, he supposes, as well as learn a thing or two. Maybe he can even swallow his pride and ask Ira to show him how to drive.

Two familiar faces turn up during the week while Gally is wearily leaning over the side of the car, passing a wrench to Ira, who lies flat on a slab of wood on wheels. Jorge saunters into the room along with He Wants Me Dead, and he whistles in astonishment, eyes roaming the bunker. The sound attracts Ira's attention and he rolls himself out from under the car.

“ _Hermano_!” The man bellows happily, voice a little too loud in the scarce room. “You're doing well.” He praises, walking toward the station wagon. Gally slides into an upright position. The boy behind him (Reese?) follows quietly, face blank and just as impressed by the retro technology as Gally was.

Ira surfaces covered in grease and a thin layer of sweat. “Yah,” he huffs hair out of his eyes, “Still got a long way to go.”

The kid nods at the car, “What are these going to be used for?”

Jorge glances back at him, eyebrows lifting, “Well, they'll make scouting a hell of a lot easier, that's for sure.”

“We're supposed to be looking for Bergs.” His tone (Erin?) is almost harsh. Blunt, and to the point. Gally can relate.

Jorge nods like he hears this once a day, at least, “And we have found these in the meantime.” His hand lingers on his elbow, and they share a look before Jorge turns away and jumps at Ira with questions about exhaust pipes and fan belts and engines and other things Gally isn't even going to pretend to understand.

The kid glowers at the back of Jorge’s head for a moment before marching outside with forced calm. Gally follows him for lack of anything better to do, as well as being mildly intrigued by the Berg hunt. He is standing stiff, rigid with his arms folded tight around his chest, and glaring at a bush when Gally approaches. The boy says nothing when he stands beside him, and Gally realizes that he doesn't know how to begin an actual conversation.

_Hi. You looking for a Berg? Why is that?_

_Hey. Warm today, huh?_

_Hello. The hell is your name?_

Gally groans inwardly. “You are never going to find a Berg around these areas,” is what he settles with.

The kid doesn't miss a beat, “You never know.”

“I might know, actually. It's been, what. Six months?” Gally waves a hand to the trees, “Nothing.”

The boy closes his eyes and shakes his head, “Somewhere.”

Gally acknowledges him for a moment, then sighs, “Look …?”

“Aris,” he says, still staring straight ahead.

 O _h, yeah._  “Aris. A Berg is a Berg – you're not gonna just find one hiding in the woods somewhere like a shucking Christmas present, all shiny and new.”

Aris's jaw tenses, “I'm not talking about  _here_. I mean in the city, somewhere. And Jorge’s being an idiot. He didn’t want to go with the group, wouldn’t let me go with ‘em …”

Gally doesn’t hear the last part, “The city? From here?” Gally taps his foot on the dirt. It hisses back at him in disdain, “You realize that it would take a week to walk to the city. At most?”

Aris's attention remains full steam ahead, yet there is a certain tone in his silence now that makes Gally think back to a few mornings ago – Minho's living room.  Backpack, rushing and – his stomach turns – other things.

But also,

_“You going for a hike?”_

Gally almost groans. “They're going to the city?” He demands, not quite able to keep the abrasion out of his voice, and for a millisecond Aris's cheeks turn pink.

“Not  _into_  the city.” He admits, “Near it.”

Gally could laugh, honestly. “Bullshit.” He hisses under his breath.

Aris scowls and kicks the dirt, “This sucks. I wanted to go with them,” Gally's scoff apparently says it all because he receives a death glare in return, “I'm tougher than I look.”

“You look like you'll break in half.”

But he gets it. If his sole purpose in life is to find a goddamn Berg, it would suck to be left behind. And he highly doubts Thomas would have left the puppy in charge while he's gone.

“If you say so,” Aris shrugs, offensively not-offended. Aris turns and walks back into the warehouse without another word. Inside Gally can hear Ira and Jorge chatting loudly and decides to take the rest of the day off. 

 

 

He picks a spot on his porch and lies there in the warm shade, listening to the leaves rustle in the breeze. He dozes off and sees a man kneel down to his very small level, gazing up at him with pure adorned affection. He is wearing a suit of blue and white, and Gally's memory's heart pounds sadly in his tiny chest. 

 _“Hey, buddy.”_ He is saying, and some other things. Gally picks up on,  _“... won't be gone long.”_  and  _“... love you.”_

Then the image shifts and he is older and taller, and the man stands in front of him again, looking almost exactly the same save for some graying around the temples, and wrinkles in the creases on his eyes when he smiles –  _beams_  – at Gally. He repeats the same words;

_“Hey, buddy.”_

_“I won't be gone long.”_

_“I love you.”_

And then,

_“Look after your mom for me, okay?”_

Gally is standing alone on the pier, staring at a small dot of a very large ship in the distance, heart pounding, lungs struggling. His legs ache from running so fast. He is screaming, yelling, calling out, but he knows the only one who can hear him is a very startled and confused fisherman in his dingy. And then a white flash, noise, aftershock. He falls to the floor of the peer, ears ringing. Pure, undefined panic.

Waves …

The image shifts again, this time to a much closer, clearer memory:

Gally lifts his forearm to shield from the sun, legs outstretched and comfortable, while his fingers tap out an ergodic rhythm against the soft grass of the Glade.  He can hear Minho humming to himself in thought, softly to his left, while he scratches at a notepad.

“Ask for better tools,” Gally murmurs, “Hammers and nails that won’t break after one or two swings. And pipes, for plumbing.”

“Uh huh ...” Minho jots it down on the pad. He drops the pencil into his lap and flips the page and frowns at some Glader's demand, “Who the shuck asked for a TV?”

Gally's laugh almost surprises him, loud and barking.  _It was probably Winston_ , he thinks,  _and only half sarcastic,_  and glances over to where Nick and Alby are sorting out this month's load of supplies. Near them, Newt is showing a still scared and weary-eyed Greenie around his new home. Gally notices he looks to be the youngest out of all of them yet. He thinks Nick called him Ben?

“Wait,” Gally says, looking back at Minho, who is now chewing on end of the pencil, “ _Shuck_?”

Minho side-eyes him, “Yeah?”

“The hell does 'shuck' mean?”

Minho just shrugs, “I dunno” he sighs pointedly and taps at the paper, “Anything else? We need to get this list down before the Box leaves. So if you have anything life changing ...”

“A ladder,” Gally says, and Minho laughs loud and rapt.

“A bulldozer.” Minho contributes.

“A  _shucking_  tunnel machine.”

Minho chuckles and writes all of this down. Gally still doesn't like the lists that much, but hey – if the monsters that trapped them all in here are “kind” enough to give them most of what they ask for, well.

Minho scribbles on the notepad a little longer, and Gally can only guess what he is writing. He looks pretty in the sunlight, even with a pencil half hanging out of his mouth, short cropped hair a darker shade of brown. It looks even softer than the grass. He feels his cheeks heating up, and he knows he is staring, yet Minho hasn't seemed to have noticed.  _How old are you?_ Gally wants to ask, though he knows Minho will never be able to answer that question, not exactly. He thinks Minho looks younger than him, but by how much, who knows. Gally feels young. Too young for any of this.

They heard the Grievers for the first time that night. And they never got the ladder or the pipes.

 

 

Gally's neck is stiff when he wakes up, finds that the wind has picked up and the sky has turned a deep orange. His house feels dark and uninviting. He should really also sweep the porch once and a while. There are dishes in the sink. The wooden floor of the porch is hard and uncomfortable – maybe he should drag a couple chairs over from one unused cabin.

He marches to the kitchen, hoping to find Frypan there so that there is someone he can unfairly yell at. (One minute into his spiel of, “Why the motherfucking shuck didn't you shucking tell me any-fucking-one was trying to find a god damn shuck Berg, you shuck-faced, slinthead, klunk dick!” Frypan merely raises an unconcerned eyebrow and says, “Sit down and eat a sandwich, cranky pants.”)

Gally bites into his dinner-sandwich with misplaced aggression. Frypan shakes his head and carries on packing away clean pots and pans around the kitchen. The radio sings at them quietly.

“And anyway,” Frypan starts, “Why do you even think I knew about that?”

Gally pokes at the tomatoes left on his plate, “You know everything.”

His friend hums, not in disagreement. Outside the sun has disappeared, and the moon is up, too large and too bright, almost suffocating. Gally tugs his sleeves down and crosses his arms, feeling cold. He can see his reflection in the polished steel table, and it looks miserable.

“Okay,” Frypan says, places the last plate in the cabinet and sits down opposite Gally, “Are you going to tell me what's wrong?”

Gally drums his fingers lightly, “Nothing's wrong.” He lies.

Frypan is incredulous, “Gal.”

“Really.” 

“Really? You storm in here like a lovin' Tycoon and now you look like you're ready to cry into the produce.”

Gally clicks his tongue and pushes the plate away, “I'm not gonna  _cry._ ”

Frypan puts a slice of tomato in his mouth, “Like a baby, dude.” A second. “I don't think I've ever seen you this miserable.”

Gally scratches at the table. Frypan sits quietly until he's ready, and eventually, Gally says, “I just remembered my dad dying.” He taps at his temple, “Saw it.”

Frypan is still for a moment, eyes wide and mouth opening and closing. When he speaks again his voice croaks, “Was it the Flair?”

Gally shakes his head, “Terrorist attack. He was ...” Gally sees the ship. The missile. The vapour trail. “At work.”

Frypan's shoulders sink, “Shit.  _Shit_  … How old were you?”

“Um.” Gally pretends to think, “Fourteen. About.”

“Shit, Gal,” Frypan repeats. He looks like he doesn't know what to do with himself for a minute, and then he says, “I'm sorry.”

Gally shakes his head, “No, It's fine. I'm – I'm fine,” and continues staring blankly at the table.

His reflection blinks at him, and its mouth is moving, and it takes Gally a second to realize he's still talking. He tells Frypan about Minho and looks up this time to see Frypan's eyebrows skyrocket. Gally suppresses a wince when Frypan says, “Shucking finally!” and goes on to tell him about Minho high-tailing it straight after.

Frypan's face falls, and his eyes narrow, “Really.”

Gally shrugs and says, “No big deal.” Though his chest says otherwise. He looks up at Frypan, “I guess I kind of deserve it a bit.”

Frypan's eyes cloud, “That's … That ain't here nor there, man.”

 _It kind of is, with us._ Gally thinks. He gets up, feeling warmer now, almost too warm. The radio is running some old recording and through the DJ's rambling he tells Frypan, “I'm gonna head back, now.”

“Okay.” Frypan still has that stunned look in his eye, “Yeah, sure. See ya, Gally.”

“Bye.”

He doesn't sleep much that night but stares at the gaping moon through his bedroom window until it disappears, finally able to doze off.

 

 

Gally wakes up hard and irritated.

He decides to take a cold shower and retreat back to bed, bleary. It didn't help at all, because lying in bed his skin still feels too hot, every inch of him hyper-aware. Gally traces patterns on the sheets mindlessly, tosses and turns and tries to ignore the discomfort in his pants, he presses into the mattress. Every time Gally closes his eyes he sees Minho smiling at him, laughing at him, taking his hand and pulling him somewhere into the woods near the Deadheads, or behind the Homestead. They never went into a room, too scared of being caught.

Groaning, he tries to abolish the images. They keep coming back.

Exhausted and so, so defeated, Gally slides a hand down his pants. His mind plagues with the memory of the look in Minho's eyes when he would pull Gally against him, kiss him. He remembers the darkness, and the urgency, Minho's hands just as fast as his breathing – short little gasps into his Gally's neck.

The desire to whisper “ _mine”_ into Minho's skin when he threw his head back.

_“Mine, mine, mine.”_

Gally bites into the sheets and with a strangled gasp he comes, embarrassingly quick. He lies there, waiting for his high to crash and burn, and the usual depreciation to reemerge. All of  _that_  was a very, very long time ago.

And then the sting happened.

Gally can still see Minho's face when he told him – screamed, he fucking screamed – to “Shuck off and leave me alone”, crystal clear. Hands reaching out not to hold but to push. One hard shove backwards, the sound of Minho's back hitting the wall with a grunt of surprise. The white bandage wrapped tightly around his arm, concealing the horror of everything he now knows.

The worry, confusion and the hurt slowly drained away to anger, and the backlash came. They were screaming and yelling so loud Gally was sure the entire Glade could hear them and surprised the Homestead didn't explode into a million splinters.  Horrible, stupid things he knows he didn't mean but could only hope Minho didn't either, faces red and barely breathing, eyes on fire. What he remembers the most is the exact point where Minho's voice began to waver, through the rage and disgust, becoming thick, choking.

_“I'm just trying to help!”_

_“You can't help! You can't help me, you can't help them – you can't help anyone. You're_ useless! _”_

Silence.

And then a sharp, shooting pain as Minho's fist swung out and connected squarely with Gally's jaw. The door slamming shut was the loudest thing yet.

Gally sunk to the floor, feeling small and damaged, mind plagued with visions of deserts and destruction, famine and disease and death. Ben found him an hour later, sobbing into his knees. He wanted Minho, wanted to go to him, and wanted to collapse in his arms, beg to be forgiven. He wanted Minho to tell him that everything he saw in the Changing was a lie. But the door slam echoed in his head, and Gally stayed exactly where he was.

 

 

Ira gets the first car running on a Friday, Gally gets emotionally wasted in Frypan's kitchen on a Saturday (and no amount of threats and bribery can make the cook tell him everything he said, though he notices his friend regarding him with more kindness than usual since) and Beth is at his front door on a Sunday with:

“Hey. I need you to move in with me.”

Gally stares, for quite some time, before replying, “No, thank you.”

Beth kicks her foot in the door before he can shut it, rolling her eyes, “I don't mean  _actually_ , idiot.” She flicks a strand of hair off her shoulder from where it escaped out of a lazy bun, irritably. The sun is particularly harsh today.

“I want to move into one of the bigger cabins because my place is too cramped, but some asshole won't let me unless I'm 'with someone'.” Beth makes an air-quote gesture, scrunching her nose in distaste.

Gally frowns, confused, “Who told you that?”

Beth waves a hand. Gally doesn't think he's ever seen her shoulders before, “Some stick, I don't know. Said if I wanted one of the bigger ones, more than just me would have to live in it. So instead of round-house kicking his teeth in I reeled back and told him I'd go fetch my  _boyfriend._ ” She leans on the door frame, smirking, “And that's you, lucky boy.”

Gally only frowns harder. Since when do they have rules on houses?

“Why?” he asks.

“Because I asked nicely.”

“You didn't ask at all,” Gally points out.

Beth sighs and gives his shoulder a light yet affirmative shove, “Just do it. I want to move.”

“No.”

“Why?” She deadpans.

“Because that’s klunk. The houses are free for all, there are no rules with them, and Thomas –”

 _Isn’t here right now._  He looks into Beth’s eyes and sees dread and worry in the tight press of her lips. When the designated leader is off on a field trip, that seems to be the perfect time to stage a mutiny. Damn.

“So, please? Can you just help me? We'll break up by next Thursday, don't worry about it.” Gally heaves a deep sigh, and then Beth says, “Besides, you owe me.”

“For what _?”_  He asks, frowning.

The look Beth gives him then is furtive and empathetic, and everything about it almost makes Gally tremble.

“Look,” She begins, “I can see that you're in your usual broody mood, so I'm not going to pry on why you keep trying to slam the door in my face.” She pauses, “Right now. But stand there and look pretty for five minutes and I will leave you alone. Deal?”

Gally is presented to a begrudged looking man who seems pissed that Beth was not lying about a significant other. Unhappy, he keeps his teeth clenched and tongue still, for his friend's sake. Beth receives a less claustrophobic home, the man glares at them before stomping away, leaving a faint trail of dust in his wake and muttering, and a strange feeling settles in his stomach about the sudden hoo-ha over housing. He briefly considers who Thomas would have left in charge, and barely gives a nod to Beth before running off.

Gally finds Brenda on her way back from the crop fields. Unlike Beth, she has made no attempt to restrain her hair, and it fluctuates around her like a long, dark thermal sheet.

Gally blurts out, “Some shank is hoarding houses,” as soon as they are within loud-talking distance.

Brenda jumps to a stop, the shovel she drags behind her emitting a teeth-searing cut off screech.  She blinks at him, or the sun, or both, looking very much like she needs a drink of water, and Gally feels the urge to run and get it for her.

“What?” She says, at last.

“Erm,” Gally backtracks a bit, and tries, “A guy is dictating the living arrangements,” though he doesn't think that helps much either. Brenda squints at him like he's made of water vapour. “Uh. My name's Gally, I'm a –”

“I know who you are,” She cuts in, in a strange voice, glances around at nothing in particular, and says, “Okay. Can we do this somewhere more … inside? I'm about to pass out here.”

Gally complies and with a tired nod, Brenda drops the shovel where she stands. In the Cafeteria, he waits patiently as she gulps down a bottle of water.

Brenda breathes deep and wipes her mouth. “So,” She says, fixing her eyes on Gally, “what's this about what?”

Gally's fingers tap on the table. “I thought the houses were free for all?” he says.

Brenda's eyebrow twitches, “They are.”

“Not according to the Munie I met this morning.”

“Who?”

Gally shrugs. Brenda makes him recount the story, and after Gally's done she hums curiously, her eyes appearing far away. Finally, she nods, brushing damp hair to the side, “Right. I'm gonna. I'm gonna go check this out ...” She begins to stand, and Gally doesn't like the tone her voice has taken.

“Anything to worry about?” He decides to ask, anyway, knowing full well.

Brenda looks at him, “No. Not really, I –” The expression on Gally's face stops her, “Look, just. I'll handle it.” She stands and pushes the chair back, the sound it makes against the polished concrete echoes around the empty room. Brenda pauses before leaving.

“Don't go …  _talking_  to people, okay?” Her voice is low, and Gally regards her strangely before miming a key turning beside his lips. Satisfied, Brenda takes off.

The mid-afternoon sun cloaks the room in distorted, striped shadows, giving the room the disturbing facade of a jail cell.

 

 

Beth plonks herself down for breakfast, opposite Gally, as usual. He stares glumly at the bowl of porridge, spoon idly drawing crop circles in the bland nutrient. He hears Beth begin to chew on her toast and drink from her cup of orange juice, all the while distracted and sleepy, eyes stinging in the aftermath of a sleepless night. 

“Have we broken up yet?” Gally asks, voice gruff.

“Was s'posed to be tomorrow, but I can make it today,” She replies, tearing at the crusts.

Gally shrugs, “Up to you.” Silence. Crop circles. “You settling in well?”

He feels her looking at him, but he keeps his head low, “Well enough.”

“Cool.”

“It is.” Silence, with more of a thoughtful pause, “Should I ask now?”

Again, Gally shrugs, “You can do what you want.”

Beth nods slowly, “But will you answer?”

Shrug.

“Okay. I'll make a dramatic announcement to Dickhead. You'll be a single man again within the hour.”

“Sure.”

“Yeah ...”

Something in her tone and body language (posture straight but not stiff, hands on the table in a relaxed curl, just the right distance away) says  _you don't have to say a word and I won't either, but I'll sit here for as long as you want,_  and it makes Gally feel instantly that little bit better.

 

 

Gally nearly kills Ira when he stomps too hard on the sticky accelerator and floors it into a tree.

“Brake,  _brake!_ ” His friend screams, hands flying out to grip the dashboard and push as far back in his seat as possible. Gally's thankfully fast reflexes ensure that he slams his foot down on the other pedal in a second. They feel a bump coupled with the sound of bending metal, and with Ira's groan of pain, Gally inwardly shrinks.

Fingers curled in a death grip and very grey in the face, Ira stammers, “Are you okay?”

Gally  _very carefully_  removes his hands from the wheel and places them in his lap, “Yes. Are you?”

“If I didn't believe in pearly white gates before, I sure do now ...”

Gally hunches, “Sorry,” he half-whispers, “The pedal stuck.”

Ira takes a deep breath, mimics Gally placing his hands in his lap. “I figured,” he points, shakily, “I'm gonna. I'm going to inspect the, uh – see if there's any damage.” He climbs out of the Wagon and Gally follows for fresh air, closing his eyes and listening to the crickets while he waits for his heartbeat to slow to a normal rhythm. Maybe he should have waited until they had more than one working car to ask for driving lessons. 

Finally, Ira sighs in relief. “It's just a little dent, nothing to stress over.”

They hop back into the car, Gally amazingly still in the driver’s seat.

“Right. Let's try reversing,” Ira instructs. Gally visibly hesitates, “What?”

“You have stupid blind faith in everyone, how are you still alive?” He demands, eyes locked forward.

Ira grins, “Just like that.”

Gally side-eyes him, takes a long deep breath, and shifts the Wagon into reverse. It's an automatic, so at least they have that going for them. Manual cars supposedly went extinct decades before their parents were even born.  The rest of the lesson runs thankfully well, and they both go home unscathed instead of nose first in a ditch somewhere.

Afternoon turns into night and Gally finds himself lounged in the centre of Ira’s living room. The crickets are loud outside. Gally lets peaceful silence dwell between them for a little longer, then finally, “You're allowed to ask, you know.”

“What?” Ira's head snaps up, eyes widening for a second and mouth twitching as he tries to mask his curiosity. 

“WICKED.” Gally explains, “You can ask me about it, it's okay.”

“I, um. Are you sure?” He says softly. Gally nods. Ira bites his lip, and eventually, “Do you remember much of it?”

Gally thinks. “A bit, yeah. Pieces, feelings, colours, stuff like that.” He snaps his fingers, “Training and a hell'ova lot of it.”

Ira frowns, “Training?”

“For the trails.”

“But … I thought the whole point of it all was that none of you remembered anything?”

Gally pauses for a moment. He feels cold as he sees short, fleeting images of start whites and grays everywhere. Liquid blue. A large underground room the size of four Cafeterias.

“You know the theory behind “muscle memory”?” Ira nods. “It was a bit like that. They would test us for different areas and then train us based on the results, so that, they hoped when we entered the Maze our brains would immediately click.”

Ira looks incredulous, “And that worked?”

Gally shrugs, “I guess.”  _Not really_ , he thinks, remembering running a whole lot more than lifting hammers and nails, but. He guesses that’s his own fault.

“What was it like? Living there, I mean.”

The question comes with a wave of so many different emotions, conflicting and fighting each other for dominance.

“It was … lonely, mostly. We were kind of allowed to talk to each other, but not for too long.”

Gally remembers the isolation. The stark white sheets and grey room. Thomas, and Theresa occasionally, being the only ones who would acknowledge his presence in the beginning, until eventually, he realized that the reason none of the other subjects would talk to him is because they weren't allowed to. He remembers the early days, of Thomas watching him like a hawk, Thomas talking to him in this calm, reserved tone that always ground his nerves, Thomas hiding all the sharp objects in the room –

He pushes  _that_  back. Far, far back.

“We found ways, though. I remember –” Gally's breath hitches and his chest constricts painfully. He rests his head against the back of the couch and stares up at the ceiling. “I roomed with a kid named Ben. There we cameras in each of the livin' quarters, but we figured out if you angled one of the beds and sat behind it, you couldn't be seen. We spent hours cramped in that shucking corner just talking to each other – he'd tell me about his life before and I'd tell him about mine.

“By the time we had to enter the Maze, I'm sure he knew more about me than I did.”

Gally blinks. It's an odd feeling to be awake while memories he didn't know he had, surface. He focuses on a nonspecific place on the wall.

“Everyone caught on eventually and did the same. So, yeah, we all got to know each other before we forgot each other.”

He remembers being cold. Always, always cold.

Gally tugs his sleeves down and turns to Ira. “The amusement park of the century, that place.” He doesn't mention the things he only sees in the deepest of his dreams, the ones where he has to force himself awake, where he curls into a ball afterwards and screams into a pillow. The experiments. The water and the heat.

And before that. Two words. The ones that destroyed everything.  _He's immune._

They stop talking about WICKED, and an hour later Gally falls asleep on Ira's couch.

He dreams of WICKED.

 

 

Frypan actually lasts longer than Gally thought he would without breathing a word about his crop beast. He is alert in a dramatic sense all week and damn fidgety by the time Saturday rolls around. Gally tolerates his aura for as long as he can stand, mixing ingredients into drinks with a kind of impartial concentration. Frypan's foot and nails begin to simultaneously  _taptaptaptap_  and he breaks.   

The glass jar chimes when it lands on the bench and Gally lets his eyes flutter closed for a second in silent preparation for the next three and a half minutes.

“What?” He drawls.

Behind him, Frypan stops, “What what?”

Gally sighs and turns, giving his friend a stern “get on with it” look.

“I saw the thing again.”

“Did you really.”

Frypan raises his palms, “Okay. Look. I know you think this whole thing is cow klunk, but just listen.”

Gally holds his arms and leans against the counter, “Fine.  Late at night?”

“Early morning.”

“Well, that's different.”

Frypan nods. “Yes. And the sun was just comin' up.”

“And?”

“And I think I know what it is.”

Alright. A revelation. This will be good. Gally stands up a little straighter. “Yeah …?” He prompts, genuine curiosity.

“It's … It's shucking huge, man. And,” he leans forward, dropping his voice despite the two of them being the only ones in the building, “And, like. Maybe six feet tall. Bulky and ugly as Hell. Four legs.”

Gally blinks, an off feeling settling in his stomach. “So – ”

“It was a stag.”

Oh. Needless to say, he wasn't expecting that.

“Ah … stag?” Silence. “As in. As in the animal?”

Frypan scoffs. “Yeah. Maybe once. But, Gal, this thing was … deformed. Its neck was long and thick as a tree trunk, with all these bumps and boils and I dunno what. And it antlers all twisted and … man.”

“Man.”

Frypan gives him a look. “You're still sceptical, aren't ya?”

Gally shifts, looking up at the ceiling. “I. I just.” He sighs. “I don't know.”

Frypan's face is solemn when Gally meets his eye again. “I do. I sure do. Trust me, the last thing I wanted was to think there were monsters still lurkin' about right where we live.” A pause, and then, “But now I think there's monsters surroundin' the whole shucking world, and we ain't got nothing to do but live with that.”

Frypan's brown eyes bore into Gally's. He doesn't look away. “With the Grievers, Cranks, those things from the Scorch … Mothershucking WICKED.”

“Us,” Gally offers. 

They hold their stare for a moment longer, then the edges of Frypan's lips curl into an astounding grin. “Yeah,” he says, “us.”

 

 

Gally dives into the lake on Monday morning. The water is that strange kind of lukewarm that is neither hot nor cold, and riddled with diseases. He plunges nose first anyway.

Gally rolls onto his back, ears down and chin up so that all he can hear is the muffled  _roar_  of the water around him. Utterly consumed, he closes his eyes, breathes in  _three, two, one,_  and lets his body sink until he can feel the rocky sand against his back. He opens and closes his eyes, enjoying the mild sting and blurry vision, counting the seconds to when his lungs feel like they will burst out of his chest before he resurfaces.

He does this seven or eight times until the sun is perfectly centred in the sky, and that just right degree of scorching. Sweat and lake water mix and match and he dives a ninth time, stays there until he sees vapour trails, until he breaks his record of seconds, until multi-coloured lights spot his vision, until water water water water.

Gally jumps to the surface, spluttering and coughing.

He is depressed, probably.

 

 

Two Group B girls, Brenda and Jorge, Aris, Beth, and Frypan and Ira are all sitting at Gally's table for dinner. Following, his stomach drops and all appetite he may have had dissolved in a cloud of Hell No, and he immediately attempts to about-face the fuck out of there. Unfortunately, Beth waves him down before he can, caught doing an awkward half shuffle, half turn toward the exit all the while trying to pretend he isn't. She gives him a knowing smirk, rising from the table and casually strolling on over.

“They just appeared,” Beth whispers, weaving her arm through his, “Sorry.”

And she actually sounds sorry.

“Evenin', Gal.” Frypan gurgles out through a mouthful of food. One of the girls (who, Gally realizes, he doesn't know the name of) shots him a glare. Gally sighs and takes the only available seat next to Aris. Which, unsurprisingly, is the furthest away from Beth at the other end. Aris has a certain self-confinement in the way he sets his shoulders, poking at his food, with a figmental glass cage floating around his body. In his head, Gally hears “ _that stick wants me dead_ ”. Beth seems unconcerned by the rain cloud, as do the other occupants.

Something is slid toward him. Gally glances up to see Frypan offering him a sandwich.

“Saved you one.”

Gally takes it, opens it, and immediately ditches the tomatoes. “You shouldn't have,” he says over-sweetly.

One of the girls, the one which looks like Autumn Incarnate, says, “So how’s the work on the cars coming along?”

“Oh yeah!” Ira chimes, voice loud. It makes Aris jump, shaking him out of his hypnosis, and a faint blush tints his cheeks when he notices Gally staring. On the other side of the boy, Jorge snickers around his fork, earning a slap. “Everything's pretty good so far.”

“Nothing's blown up yet,” Gally remarks, taking a bite. Beth barks a laugh. When he meets Ira's glare he takes a wild guess that the driving lessons have been put on temporary suspension. Which. The girl offers her services for future car-related production, to which Ira metaphorically trips over himself to accept. 

Gally decides to back out of the conversation, content with just eating and half-listening to the people around him. He learns the names of the two girls, finally (it had been long enough and he felt too embarrassed to ask) in the form of Brenda asking Harriet, with smooth brown skin and striking, soul-piercing eyes Gally has a hard time looking at for too long, to pass the salt. Sonya's long red hair slips off her shoulder, landing directly into her dinner bowl. Harriet clicks her tongue and brushes it out of the way, Gally not missing her fingers brushing against her neck for a moment too long, and Sonya's little smile in return. 

Partway through quiet and, admittedly, yes,  _nice_  conversion, Harriet glances up at something on the other side of the room. Confusion washes her features and she calls out, “What the hell happened to you?” to which all the occupants of the table turn to catch sight of Thomas walking casually down the aisle toward them. Or, more specifically, the split lip, bruised cheek, angry black eye and all round drained expression he is sporting. He drags a chair over to the full table without a word, sits and picks a lonely piece of tomato off Gally's plate, all the while seemingly oblivious to the shocked stares of everyone seated.

The atmosphere fills with an awkward silence no one is apparently game enough to break until Thomas swallows the fruit, quietly asks Aris to pass some water over, then, “Hey, guys.”

Then nothing.  His sleeve pulls when he reaches over, revealing a gash on his wrist and more bruises. He holds his shoulders stiff.

Eventually, Gally decides to break the spell and is frankly shocked at the concern in his own voice,

“What happened to you?”

Thomas takes another swig of water and pretends he doesn't hear. He says, “Man, I'm starving.”

“Thomas ...” Aris tries, finally speaking.

Thomas reaches over and picks the tomatoes off Gally's plate, “So, what's been happening?” he asks.

Gally takes in his beaten and battered form along with the strange nonchalance, and the stunning lack of party members, including a certain sarcastic pain in the ass. He feels his anxiety levels spike.

“Thomas, what happened?” Gally says, louder and more demanding, as their selective mute leader is sticking a piece of abandoned chicken from Aris's plate in his mouth. Thomas lets out a sigh and drops his hands onto the table, depressed.

“We didn't find anything,” he says finally, voice low and failed, “That city is like a ghost town, I swear. Never seen anything like it. The Scorch doesn't even  _compare ..._ ”

“No Bergs?” Sonya pipes up in astonished disbelief, “Not one anywhere?” Thomas shakes his head. Beside Gally, Aris visibly deflates.

“People?” Aris offers, hopefully.

Thomas shakes his head once more, “Not one.”

Brenda's voice rings out, “But you ran into  _someone._ ”

“No –” Thomas realizes his mistake, and his cheeks redden in a minor panic. “Er, right. Um. It's nothing.” Silence. Gally's stomach turns uneasily.

“I'm not lying, okay. I wouldn't do that.”

“Then what happened to your –”

“I don't want to talk about it.” He slides out of his seat, knuckles brushing against Aris's shoulder, and leans to whisper something in his ear. The look on Thomas's face wishes there wasn't such an audience.

Aris blinks at him, very confused, “Um. Yes?”

“Great.”

He begins to leave. Brenda is out of her chair, “Tom –”

“Don't wanna talk about it.” Thomas swiftly walks away.

Everyone is too stunned to say anything, an odd sort of feeling settling in Gally's gut. When Brenda voices that she should check on him, Gally announces, “I'll go.” He is out of his seat so fast that its legs screech against the concrete, and he is just about running out the door.

He spots Thomas's retreating figure around a bend, calls out, “Thomas.” Then, “Hey, Thomas!” But he doesn't respond.  Gally sighs and jogs to catch up.

He is within a six-meter radius when he unconsciously shouts, “Tommy!”

And watches the boy stop in his tracks, perfectly still. Gally internally winces, rounding his front with caution. Thomas is staring at the ground, face blank, and Gally notices a deep cut on his chin. With a barely-there sniff Thomas looks up, expression and voice tangled in that detached patience from the corner of Gally's memory.

“Yes?”

“You, uh,” He motions to his chin, “you might wanna get Clint to look at that.”

“It's fine.”

Gally eyes him, “You okay?”

Thomas scoffs, “You're concerned.”

“You're freaking me – and everyone – out a bit. So yeah.” Gally stops him when he tries to sidestep around.

“Look, I really don't want to talk.” Step.

“You said.” Block. Thomas sighs, visibly irritated. Gally says, “You should really get that checked.”

Thomas rakes a hand through his hair, “Gally, please. I don't care about a shucking scar, okay?”

Gally flicks his chin, “Yeah?” and blocks Thomas's path once again. He keeps his hands in his pockets, doesn't touch him.

“What'id you ask Aris?”

“None of your business.”

“So what the shuck's the matter with you?”

Thomas growls, loud and furious, screams, “ _Nothing!_ ” so loud it echoes off the surrounding huts. Gally bites down the instinct to flinch away while paradoxically cheering  _that's it there you go you can do it!_

Thomas breathes heavily for a moment, eyes fluttering shut in forced restraint, and for one scary second Gally thinks he might cry. Until, finally, he shoves past Gally, “Just leave me the shuck alone!”

He stares at Thomas's furious, retreating figure. Then, “You might wanna see Brenda about a mutiny, alright, Tommy? Just a fair warning!”

He ignores the middle finger he gets for that.

Gally groans, removing his caped hands from his mouth, and the small voice in his head shouts  _Minho_. Off to his left is the small figure of Minho and Thomas's house, which Thomas is walking in the opposite direction of, which he stares at thoughtfully, stomach unsettled.

He goes home, instead.

 

 

Going home was a very bad idea, for two reasons. The first being that with all of the doors and windows shut, Gally's house is virtually a sauna. The air chokes him upon entry, a phantom fist shooting out and taking him by the throat. Reason two is the boy sitting on his sofa, red-faced and stubbornly ignoring the heat. Minho meets his gaze, face stony and eyes red, hair sticking to his forehead.

“Hey,” He says.

And that's it.

Gally stares at him, opens his mouth, closes it, and leaves the room. He does not come back until all of the windows are open, gentle afternoon breeze cleansing the house. Gally sighs into it, hands gripping the ledge, letting the oxygen enter his system.

The truth is he's stalling, he knows that, and Minho probably knows it, too.

He un-bashfully fills a glass of water and shoves it in Minho's hand, leaves the room again before he can start screaming, which will benefit  _no one_ , paces his bedroom in mild stupid, pathetic panic until the temperature lowers several degrees and he thinks he can re-enter the living room.

Minho has drained his cup.

Yeah no. Gally  _so_  does not have the mental capability to deal with this right now.

He sighs. Very deeply. For all eternity, fuck.

“Why the hell is he staying at Aris's?” Gally asks, slipping his hands into his pockets to stop them from reaching out and touching.

Minho's eyes widen in surprise, “Is he? Good.”

Gally raises a brow, “Why is that good?”

Minho's eyes cloud over a moment, and he mimics Thomas's about-to-cry expression from earlier, except with more rage, and spits, “Because I hate him.”

Gally groans and collapses into the old armchair. The bookcase rattles. “You are  _infatuated_  with him, don't give me that bullshit.” He shoots a look, “And how did you get in here?”

Minho looks very interested in the pattern in the grey carpet, “I found your spare key.”

“I don't  _have_  a spare key.”

Minho winces, then sniffs, “Fine. I broke in. Sorry.”

Gally stares, seeing but not seeing the boy in front of him. It isn't the one he recognizes, not in the slightest. He doesn't sit straight, that formerly perpetual aura of confidence lies in pieces on Gally's living room floor. There is no quick wit and snide humour. Minho is slouching, hands cupped on his knees and arms tight to his body, he looks defensive and vulnerable and sad, so so sad.

Gally doesn't say  _shucking hell I missed you so much and now you're still not here_. Not the time. He says, “What happened out there?” voice barely a whisper.

Minho's fists clench, and suddenly Gally notices the skin off his knuckles, red and bruised. Gally forgets to breathe a moment, and it seems so does Minho, as he gasps suddenly, eyes everywhere but him, blinking like mad and an inch away from hyperventilation.

“I mean,” His voice is thick, raw, and Gally grips the armrests, “I mean, I knew. I shucking  _knew_ , okay, I could  _see_  it.”

“See what?” Gally murmurs.

Minho goes on like he doesn't hear, “From the beginning. From that day, as soon as he came back I could see nothing was the same. That. That something had … happened, and.”

Minho's voice cracks, a tear falling down his cheek, and Gally feels his resolve do the same. Minho continues, “And the fact that he thought he could just keep it from. Shuck, he had blood on his  _face_  –”

“You're not making any sense!” He doesn't mean to shout, really, and feels terrible when Minho jumps from the couch, hands near slapping the wetness off his face and shaking head to toe. Gally is crossing the floor in an instant, inwardly chiding  _you selfish idiot._

He takes Minho's arm, “I'm sorry.”  _I'm sorry I'm sorry I'm sorry_. Part of Gally says he doesn't know what Minho is talking about, while the other half is counting Gladers like sheep. He keeps a firm grip on Minho, even if the latter is tugging away, pushing, growling, swearing, tears that were teetering on the rim of his eyes now falling, and Gally is desperately trying to calm him down. Both hands holding tight onto his biceps while Minho's fists pound against his chest, angry – and possibly the worst part about this is they both know Minho is so much stronger than Gally.  Minho is weak, and tired, and pale, and so distressed.

With one final angry groan, Minho grabs Gally by the shirt and pulls him in so fast they almost lose their balance. There is a clash of teeth that hurt, and Minho kisses him with such ferocity Gally's lips will be bruised for days.  Every inch of him fails, crumbles to pieces, and kisses Minho back just as hard. It screams  _I hate you, I hate everything,_ but it isn't until Minho's hands clench in his hair, and he feels wetness on his cheeks, the kiss angry and intense, too passionate, that Gally pulls away. Shaky, unsteady, dizzy.

Minho follows his lips, a small whine emitting from the back of his throat that just about  _destroys_  Gally. When Minho finally realizes he isn't going to keep kissing him, he leans back, eyes fluttering in confusion and ( _shit_ ) hurt.

“What?” He asks.

 _What?_  Gally repeats, scolding himself.  _What is it? What's wrong with you?_ Had he not been thinking about this for weeks? Years? And the moment he gets Minho, and he doesn't look like he is a; going to knock Gally's lights out or b; run for the hills, Gally –

He hesitates.

To which Minho takes how it looks – like rejection.

Dread washes his features and Gally swears he can hear the stream of profanities screaming around his brain. Until he voices them, pulling away, “Shit. Shuck.  _Crap_  –” And on and on, until he sidesteps around Gally, who manages to break out of whatever stupor he is into drop-kick all the pride he has left and lunge to grab onto Minho, spinning him away from the door because all this looks way too familiar and  _No. Nope. No way, not again_ because shuck if Gally is letting him leave a third time.

Because here is Minho thinking Gally doesn't want him.

 _I will never_ not _want you_  is what Gally tries to tell him with the following kiss, hands on either side of his face, fingers softly toying with the hair that curls just under his ear, slightly damp but it isn't bad, nothing about Minho is bad, he thinks, as he kisses him as gentle as he's ever done anything, as he thought himself capable. Minho's palms flat on his chest and Gally's tongue in his mouth feels like one thousand apologies.

Minho is mumbling small, little _please_ s against his lips, and Gally doesn't quite know what he is asking for until he is being pulled down to the couch. It could be funny how easily he settles in between Minho's legs – hips to hips, chest to chest, hands wandering. He feels like he is on autopilot, mouthing at Minho's jaw while his hands find his belt and fumble with the buckle. Minho is sighing beneath him, rolling his hips up, and it's half awkward and Gally doesn't think he quite remembers how to do this either, but it's still so  _good_  that Gally's heart races ten-fold.

Gally trails a path down Minho's neck, tasting the slightest bit of dirt and sweat, but he finds he really can’t care any less. His breath hitches when Gally's hands skirt his ribs lightly, and the back of his mind reminds him,  _ah, yeah, ticklish_ and the thought and concept that he once knew all of Minho's weak spots and can possibly even learn more is so – 

Minho chokes on a moan when Gally's hand brushes across his shorts. He feels Minho's hands gripping his shoulders and chances a glance up. His cheeks are flushed red, breathing heavily through his mouth, hair fanning across his forehead is disarray. It’s so enticing that Gally nearly blacks out with lust. Dark, lidded eyes lock on to his and that's it. He shoots up a crashes their lips together, and it is clumsy and off-centre, but Gally is starting to think that's just  _them._

They are all fumbling hands and quick kisses and rough and fast and _fast fast fast_ , like if they don't rush then nothing will ever get done and the moment will leave them both behind to wallow in its trail. This is how they were back then, Gally reflects, groaning when Minho's legs swing and wrap themselves around his waist, fingers dipping past hemlines; quick. In and out before anyone can notice or miss them. One quick pinch on the elbow and a look out of Minho's eye, Gally knew to follow him into the woods to be pushed against a tree, too push up against a tree, the grass, the dirt, the wall of the Maze.

Gally moans louder than intended when Minho touches him, and he swears he feels a smirk against his jaw. A hand reaches to grasp something, anything to anchor him, which so happens to be Minho's hair. He grips hard and yanks when Minho pulls a little too tight on him, flushes, and mouths at his neck in apology, though Minho doesn't seem to mind that much.

He comes with a gasp and a shudder, face buried in Minho's neck. He brings Minho off with his mouth, slowly, in every way he knows, and when he arches and groans, head thrown back and eyes fluttered shut, Gally decides he really did miss  _that._  

 

 

It's awkward, after. To put it lightly.

Neither of them talk, and when Gally escapes to the bathroom to wash his hands and face, shaky and flushed, he half expects Minho to be gone. Instead, he finds him raiding the kitchen.

“You got'ny mayo or something?” Minho asks, squinting into the fridge, brows furrowing at the stunning lack of occupants.

Gally glances to the blank counter tops in confusion. “For what?” he asks, cautiously. 

Minho looks at him, something unspoken passes over his eyes, and he closes the fridge, “Never mind.”

Then his stomach growls.

Gally sighs and reaches for the high cabinet, the one with the duct tape (still need to fix that) and pulls out a box of cereal. It's not much, but it's something he can offer Minho. He makes a mental note to raid the storerooms again, soon and tells himself he needs to stop being so reliant on the cooks. Pouring the last of the milk into a bowl (still, enough for coffee tomorrow, thank God.  _Maybe two cups_ , he thinks, with a stupid flutter in his lower stomach) with Minho stuttering beside him, and unceremoniously adding a spoon, Gally hands it to him.

He might be going crazy, it is a very plausible theory after all, but he thinks he sees Minho flush for a second.

He awkwardly takes the offered cereal, eyes flicking up and down and not quite able to settle on Gally, mutters his thanks and sits at the table. Gally takes a moment to pray for strength.

His brain is a concoction of what-the-shuck-now and oh-my-god, and Gally has never felt more uncomfortable in his own house and his own skin, as he does this very second. The sounds of Minho chewing is the only thing that fills the silence. No crickets, for once. The sun is setting and it casts an orange shadow across the floor, picks at the dust in the air, projecting a near-literal barrier between Gally and Minho, and Gally despises it. He crosses the short distance and joins Minho at the little round table.

Oh, God _,_  the awkwardness _._

Minho watches the dust particles dance in the air, blankly chewing, and Gally watches him.

“Not hungry?” Minho mumbles, staring out the window.

“Already ate. Thanks.” Gally eyes the setting sun in envy because at least it can escape from this scenario.

Minho hums, and the air shifts ever so slightly. “Missed me?” he asks, a tinge of the old Minho returning and Gally sighs internally.

“I cried myself to sleep every night.”

Minho huffs a short laugh, “Bet you did.” He swallows a spoonful of cereal, “Clutching your pillow?”

“Oh yeah, definitely,” Gally rolls his eyes.

“Reciting poetry?”

Gally feels embarrassment welling up in his chest but forces himself to play along, “Shakespearean sonnets, actually. You don't deserve Keats.”

Minho side-eyes him. “I'll pretend to know who those are.”

Gally scoffs softly in distaste.

After a moment, “Did you jerk off?”

Gally chokes on air. Minho's snicker is muffled by his hand and a mouthful of cereal. “Too soon?”

“I could kill you,” Gally replies, eyes wide and face red.

Minho picks up the bowl and drinks the last bit of milk. Gally considers pushing it into his stupid face. When Minho drops the bowl back on the table he leans back, eyes filled with mirth. Gally is suddenly filled with a strange … defensive? Irritated? Arousal.

“It's totally cool if you did,” Minho says, oblivious and smug. He inclines his chin, “I mean, I am a catch –”

He breaks off when Gally practically propels himself across the table, yanks Minho from his seat and presses a breathless, searing kiss onto him. Minho makes a little noise of surprise, stirring Gally up more, who walks him back until he is pressed against the counters. They pull apart, panting, Gally's lungs burning, and he whispers, “ _Slinthead_ ,” into Minho's bottom lip, teeth making an appearance.

Minho is already pulling them into the hallway.

 

 

The morning sun blares down onto Gally, blinding and horrendous, and for once he seriously wishes he had closed the curtains. (Minho mentioned it, many times, muttering “shucking exhibitionist” in an accusatory tone. Gally rolled his eyes and  _made_  him be quiet.) He groans and rolls into the pillow, burying his face petulantly. His pillow is very sweaty and oddly human-like, and groans in return.

Minho's fists clench the pillow – the actual pillow, the one he is  _hoarding_  – and lifts his head up before Gally can even think about warning him.

“Oh, shuck!” He shrieks, immediately face-planting again, “Mothershucking  _God._ ” Minho whimpers and Gally strokes his shoulder. He only whines more and attempts to shuffle away. Gally doesn't take it personally, especially when Minho makes a sound something like a small, angry animal and whines even more, “Could you just. Move? Shucking hell, it's too  _hot_  … And early. What time is it?”

“No idea,” Gally admits, shifting away, “And  _you're_  the morning person,” he mutters, off hand.

“Not when I've had, like, three hours sleep, man,” One fist uncurls from the pillow to flop noncommittally to the side, “Can you close them, jeez!”

“Alright, alright, princess.”

Minho makes an offended noise, “Does your ass hurt? Didn’t think so.” He waves lazily, “Go.”

Gally sighs and swings off the bed, hand shielding him from the too-bright sunlight. Eventually he manages to reach the window by feel and tug them closed. The room dims and Minho sighs audibly. Gally blinks repeatedly, attempting to bat the spotted vision away, but only ends up with an eyelash in his left eye. It occurs to him, looking back at Minho snuggled comfortably in his bed, only a thin sheet covering him very low on his hips, that Gally is standing in the middle of his bedroom stark naked.

He is both not game enough to peek into the living room to check the time, and too drowsy to care, so Gally carelessly flops back onto the mattress, Minho moaning unhappily when he is jostled.

He looks peaceful and serene, Gally notes, and is reminded of a black Labrador from his childhood. Minho's skin is flushed with a thin coat of sweat. His shoulder, collar bone, and the long line of his spine is painted in hickeys. Right now Gally particularly focuses on his back: the jagged, spiderweb of scars exploding outward all along the right side of his back. Gally most certainly did not freak the hell out when he saw them. Minho wouldn't tell him what they're from.

When Minho groans again, Gally shakes himself awake, and says, “You're the one who insisted on round three.” He shuffles back to bed.

Minho mumbles a mock version of Gally's voice into the pillow. Gally rolls his eyes. “I would have been fine with just going to sleep –” That’s a lie “– But noooo. Gally!” He uplifts his voice in a cheap imitation of Minho's, “We have two years to catch up on. Two!”

“ _Shhhh_.”

Gally smirks to himself and relaxes against the pillows, staring at the ceiling. This is the first time he has slept the right way round.

“You got anywhere you have to be today?” Gally asks, half curious.

Minho snorts, finally turning to look at him. “Shuck no.” He adds, “You?” in a softer voice Gally doesn't have the energy to dissect.

He thinks for a moment. And groans. “Ugh. I think Ira needs me at the garage today ...”

Silence descends and Gally turns to see Minho blinking at him.

“The what?” He asks, clueless.

Gally shakes his head. “The garage,” he repeats, using air quotes with what Ira affectionately dubbed the smaller warehouse.  

Minho is still very confused, “What do you need to do in there?”

“Ah, just work on the other two cars we have left to fix … What?”

Minho looks like he is seriously attempting to fry his brain with his eyes, “You found _cars?_ ”

Gally swallows, “Yeah?”

Minho groans and the mattress bounces when he flops around to lie on his back. “Why couldn't you find them weeks ago!”

Gally shrugs, “Sorry?” smirking when Minho shakes his head. His gaze shifts along his body, over his chest and stomach, toned from years of running every day, all day. The bed sheet had shifted even lower over his hips, and.

Gally reaches for him, rolls closer, and captures his lips. Minho responds immediately, hands roving when Gally moves to hover over him, hissing, “Take a day off.”

Gally can’t, but he appreciates it and doesn't make the journey down Minho's torso long at all. When he's done and Minho is a panting mess on the bed, Gally remarks, “You can come, too.”

And Minho looks so confused it's kind of cute.

“To the garage,” Gally sounds.

Minho mutters something, arms reaching out to keep him close.

Ira asks him why he looks so happy upon entering through the large barn doors. Gally shrugs and doesn't respond. His friend tells him to “stop, it's freaking me out” but doesn't comment on the afterglow he can so obviously see.

 

 

Gally thinks he is being nice by returning Minho's shirt to him, but when Minho takes one look at the item of clothing, says, “Thanks,” uncaring, kicks the door shut and pulls Gally into him, asking, “Stay here?” Gally understands he has walked right into a trap.

He sighs and kisses Minho back anyway.

 

 

By the calendar, they should be in that transition where Summer sea-saws into Autumn, but the temperature is hotter than ever. The grass is brown and the crops are dying at an alarming rate. Workers pass out in the fields, or around town in general. The ration system returns. Munies and Gally are working on getting the cooling units in some of the larger houses up and running. People are encouraged that, if they live alone, to stop that until the heat wave passes. 

Five Munies have passed out in the last week, and two are in the infirmary recovering from extreme dehydration. Thomas, with flushed skin and dark circles, orders everyone to sleep in the Cafeteria until further notice, it being, by large, the coolest area they have. The warehouse is transformed into a bunker for weeks. People complain – Minho being one of the loudest, Thomas casually avoids any and all eye contact, and conveniently loses the ability to hear – but in the end, realize that this is the best option.

Minho keeps a distance from him in public and gives up in the evening, dragging his sleeping bag directly beside Gally's. He pulls him behind buildings in between.  No one notices or seems to care, thank God. (Gally watches his sleeping form, and in the early hours of the morning he doesn't feel ridiculous for wanting to snake an arm around his waist and pull him close. He sighs and turns the other way, instead.)

Thomas helps with the building the cooling system, but hardly ever talks. To anyone. He nods, shakes his head, or answers “yes”, “no” or “I don’t know” when Gally asks him anything.

One day he trips over a scrap pile, the toolbox he is barely carrying breaks open, scattering its contents in every direction, and he falls to the ground. He doesn't get back up.

Gally drops his work on the bench and sprints over to Thomas. He kneels over his body, shielding him from the harsh sun with his own, hands gripping his shoulders and shaking. “Thomas!” He says, slapping his cheek, “Thomas, hey, hey, wake up!”

With a small groan that sends shivers down Gally's spine, Thomas opens his eyes a fraction, breathing shallow.

“What happened?” Gally looks up to see Brenda and Aris rushing over, looking panicked. Brenda has a water bottle in her hand, which she immediately shoves in Thomas's face when they're close enough.

“He passed out,” Gally helps Aris lift him into a sitting position, which only makes Thomas groan louder.

Brenda pushes her ponytail to the side, red-faced and huffing irritably, cursing in Spanish. “Dude, when was the last time you slept?”

“Last Tuesday,” Aris answers for him, with a deep frown, “Which is also the last time I've seen him eat or drink anything.”

Brenda makes this sound somewhere between deep concern and disappointment and brushes his hair out of his eyes.

“I'll take him to Clint,” Gally says, and doesn't wait for approval before taking Thomas's arm and hoisting the boy over his shoulder, groaning under his weight. Brenda and Aris follow at his heels, making sure he doesn't slip off Gally's back.

“I swear to shuck, Greenie,” Gally hisses, eyeing the clinic, “If you throw up on me I will actually throttle your ass.”

No response. Gally breaks into a jog.

Clint's face, when they burst through the door, is not surprised. His face when Gally shoots down the actual doctors (well, one nurse and three Pre-Med students, but  _whatever_ ) and refuses anyone but Clint to treat him, is. The Glader shoos them out of the tent without a hint of reassurance or guilt, anyway, which makes Gally smile.

 

 

Gally decides to check on him at sundown, unable to hold down the sigh of relief when he sees Thomas sitting up, nibbling on a nutrient bar (he nearly hits himself for actually being worried about  _Thomas,_  of all people). He is staring at nothing, jaw moving slowly, looking exhausted. Clint is speaking to him softly, scribbling on a notepad.

Gally smirks, leaning up against a post. “So, doc, what's the verdict? How many limbs we gotta cut off?”

Both Thomas and Clint simultaneously give him a  _look._

Clint rolls his eyes and taps at his notebook with the pen. “The verdict is extreme dehydration and critical sleep deprivation. Three days of bed rest at a _minimum_ ,” He aims that last part at Thomas, voice pointed,  “Okay?”

“Yes,” Thomas answers, voice low and hoarse.

Clint doesn't look like he believes him all that much but is willing to play along for now. “Good. Because I mean it. How many times do you have to get brought to be unconscious?”

Thomas shrugs. Gally thinks he would have blushed if he had the energy to. “I dunno. At least once more?”

Clint glares, standing up.

Thomas slides on the bed, “Fine, okay. I promise.”

Gally bites his cheek, watching the exchange. Thomas's back talk and Clint's deadpan expression as he handles blood and broken bones and cuts and bruises remind him of life back in the Glade. And for once it isn't a bad thing.

“Oh,” Clint says, suddenly, turning on his heel, “by the way, Billy and Tim came by earlier when you were asleep. They send their get-well-soon's.”

Thomas's eyebrows furrow and Gally lightly kicks the leg of his cot before he can stupidly ask “who?”. He coughs, awkwardly, secretly eyeing Gally, and responds instead with, “Why?”

Why does he even bother?

“Because,” He sighs, exasperated, dropping into a chair, “You're a Glader. Gotta stick together, right? Even after ...” Gally trails off.

Clint is watching him curiously when he looks up. Meeting his eye, there is something warm and reminiscent in them. “Gally's right,” he says, finally breaking eye contact, “Even after.”

He walks over to an empty row of cots, not too far away, and retires comfortably, continuing to annotate his notebook. They watch him in silence.

“He's always been like that, by the way.”

Thomas hums softly.  

The air is thick and humid, making them both lethargic. Clint switches a light on when it gets too dark, but otherwise doesn't move or talk, giving no indication that he can hear anything they're saying. He stares up at the stars, the only noise from the crickets, Thomas sipping from a cup, and Clint's pen scratching.

And then, “I'm sorry.”

Gally's attention snaps to him, shocked. “For what?”

Thomas stares straight ahead. “I don't know. A lot of things, really.”

Gally continues to stare at him for a minute, tongue-tied. Eventually, he blurts out from the ether, “You need to stop acting like you owe everyone your life.”

Thomas raises an eyebrow, “Don't I?”

“Shuck no!”

He may have said that a little too loud and Clint may have given him an odd glance, looking as if he were about to tell Gally to quit harassing his patient. Instead, he just says, “Visiting hours end in five.”

Gally ignores him, clearing his throat and lowering his voice, “If anything, it's the exact opposite.”

Thomas snorts, “If you say so.”

“I do say so. You don't owe anyone shit.” Gally bites at his lip, and says, “Look. If it weren't for you, I wouldn't be here right now.” Thomas finally looks at him, puzzled. Gally elaborates, “That day when you asked me to come with you? If you didn't I’d still be with the Right Arm. I'd probably be dead.” He adds, “So, um. Thanks. For that. Seriously.”

Something shifts behind Thomas's eyes and again, Gally thinks he is going to start crying.

He doesn't, just says, “Thanks, Gally. And ...” He looks sad again. Gally just doesn't understand anymore. “You're welcome.”

“No prob.” He smirks, “Even though you are a shucking weirdo.”

Thomas glares. “You have a bruise. On your collarbone,” he remarks, casually. Clint's eyes twitch from his notebook to Gally for half a second. “Just saying.”

Gally glowers, “And you look like Bark. Just saying.” He stands up, legs a little shaky, “Get a haircut.”

Thomas smirks right back.

“Dinner time,” Gally announces quickly, not sure what to do with his hands. He nods to Thomas. “And your bedtime.” He stares for a little longer, “Seriously, cut your hair. You look thirteen and it's weird.”

Thomas rolls his eyes skyward, “Goodnight, Gally.”

He waves sarcastically to both him and Clint and nearly crashes into Minho on the way out. They stare at each other for a moment, until Minho peeks over Gally's shoulder to where Thomas lies, extremely conflicted.

Gally groans, head lulling back, “Oh, my God, just go over to him.”

Minho is about to refuse, but Gally can also tell he really doesn't want to. He punches his shoulder. “ _Now._  It's about time.” When Minho still doesn't move, Gally leans forward and whispers, “I will fuck you silly, later,” hearing Minho's breath hitch as his eyes widen, cheeks turning a charming shade of pink.  

Which is just the time Clint chooses to waltz through the arch proclaiming, “Visiting hours are over –”

Gally jumps away, and Clint stops a moment to take in Minho, and Gally, more specifically Gally’s mortified glare, and decides, “Alright, whatever. Be quick. I'm serious that he needs sleep. Desperately.”

Minho leans to peek at Thomas in the next room before striding past Gally and Clint. Clint shakes his head at them and leaves, abandoning Gally to desperately try to find an excuse to loiter. He paces like a loser, trying to listen in, though all he can hear is hushed whispering and what sounds like the beginnings of an argument, and his chest constricts nervously. He isn't sure why he is so on edge; maybe because Minho and Thomas at odds is disturbing and unnatural, and it's affecting even him. (Though he knew it would never last – Minho loves him too much. He pushes back the churning in his stomach.)

It seems to be going not-too-badly until he hears sobbing, and peeks into the room, stomach dropping. Thomas is curled with his face on his knees and hands clenched in his hair. Minho is staring at him, seated on the edge of the cot and looking in pain.

“You –” Thomas is stuttering. “You have  _no idea_.” His voice breaks, and after a deep breath, says, “Don't even bother trying and make me feel guilty, Minho, that is all I've been shucking feeling for months!”

Minho's hands fist in his lap, unwilling to speak any time soon. Thomas looks up at him, and Gally can't see his face but Minho visibly winces.

“You think I haven't been seeing him  _everywhere?_ You think I don't have nightmares about it every night? That I can't still hear his voice when –” He chokes, sobs painfully, pulling his knees closer to his chest,  “Because I do. All the time. Every day, every night, I j-just.”

His voice is only a quiet whisper now, and Gally strains to hear chest hammering. He’s never seen him like this before, “He was begging me. Okay? He wasn’t …  _there_  anymore, but whatever he had left of himself was  _begging me_. And I – It killed me, Minho, but. You didn't see him. You didn't see what the Flair had done to him and –”

Thomas's voice breaks again. Gally thinks he hears Minho sniff. He feels sick.

Thomas laughs flat. Humourless. Dead.  _“God._  I don't even know if I did the right thing, but then I remember his face and ... But some days I think that I could have tried harder, I sh-should have tried harder for him and … other days I get memories. From before. And – And I ...”

The rest is muffled. Gally clutches the wall as the room spins. He might hear Minho telling Thomas to show him something, or hold out something but it makes no sense, everything is spinning and he feels so so sick.

“Shuck,” He hears, finally,  _“Shuck,_  Thomas, I – Holy shit.” Minho slides forward on the cot and wraps his arms tight around Thomas. Gally can't hear anything else besides Thomas's muffled, pained apologies, and manages to run outside before throwing up.

When he’s done he stumbles to the ground, shaking, air too hot and choking choking  _choking_  –

It's how Minho finds him ten minutes later; fists clenched and in pieces. He stops in his tracks, Gally notices his cheeks and eyes are red, and states, “You heard all that.”

Gally stares for the longest moment before looking away, deep into the dark abyss through the gaps in the trees and scratching at a hole in his shorts.

“Yeah.”

Minho sighs behind him. The dirt crunches when he walks closer. Gally involuntarily flinches, and he stops.

“I didn't know,” Gally says, voice dull.

“Gally ...”

“No one told me.  _Anything.”_

The dirt moves again. “Gal – ”

“Anything!” He doesn't mean to shout, but it shoots out of him like a bullet. He stands up, and Minho takes a step back. “I knew  _something_  happened, I mean, Newt isn't here, but –” Gally breaks off. Minho winces at the mention of Newt's name. He wonders if he is the first person to say it out loud in seven months. 

He takes a deep breath, angrily wiping his eyes and waiting for Minho to speak. He doesn't. He's staring at the ground, humid wind blowing his hair to and fro, obscuring his face in shadows.

“You know, he was my friend, too, once.”

This makes Minho look up. The shadows on his face dance with the light from the infirmary at his back, giving him a strange ghostly glow. “I never said he wasn't,” he responds, voice gruff. 

“I  _know_  he was,” Minho continues, “Okay? I know that. He was my friend, and Frypan's, and Clint's and Billy and Tim's, and Jeff and Winston and Zart and Nick and Ben and shucking Alby! Okay!” Minho shouts. “Newt was their friend, and now he's dead.”

He stops and wipes a hand down his face, voice and breath shaky, “I'm tired of mourning people. It doesn't change the fact that ninety-percent of all the people we've ever known are gone, alright, Gal?”

He locks eyes with Gally, and behind them, he sees a fire that's about the burnout. Minho shakes his head and laughs, suddenly, a bit on the hysterical side, throwing his arms out beside him, “That's how the great world outside the Maze rolls.”

Gally looks away, and they're both silent for a while. Someone inside the infirmary turns a light out. He feels hollow and vacant, the air that touches his skin seems to tingle, a million tiny fingertips running up and down his body, leaving him gross and sick.

Minho says, “I'm sorry,” and Gally isn't sure who exactly he's talking to. Then, “I'm exhausted and I don't wanna think right now.” His voice takes on a familiar tone, albeit faint and sluggish.

And Gally says, “No,” hollowly, staring blank at a broken leaf at his toe. “You might be done mourning, but I'm sure not.”

He closes his eyes, dizzy, hears Minho walk closer before warm hands touch his elbows, and he near crumbles. He can't make himself look at Minho's face, scared of what he'll see there. The touch is soft and doesn't move any deeper, closer, doesn't seek anything further, and Gally.

Gally keeps his eyes shut, chest constricting as he stands there like a coward because he isn't sure how to give Minho what he's asking for.

Eventually, Minho drops his arms and leaves. Gally keeps watching the small leaf until it is swept up in the wind and blown away, and he looks at the infirmary, seeing through its walls.

He thinks – and it's horrible, so, so horrible – but he thinks,  _Okay, we're even._

That night Gally alternates between glaring blankly at the vast, high ceiling of the Cafeteria, and staring at Minho's sleeping figure some few meters away, back to him. He lies there, sweltering and dejected, considers dragging his sleeping-rug over to Minho just to be near him, so that maybe when they wake up in the morning Minho will see the “I'm sorry” in the gesture and they can put all of this behind them and get back to.

Get back to whatever the hell they are.

Except that he can’t stop hearing Thomas's sobbing confessions, seeing Newt in his memory, and his chest constricts.

The air doesn't choke him so much as he walks to his house, slow and lethargic, almost sleep-walking. He opens every window and door, throwing caution and paranoia to the wind – if monsters want to come and mutilate his body during the night they'll be greeted with open arms. He turns every light off and curls into a ball at the end of his bed, counting breaths like sheep.

“I'm scared,” he told Newt that first night when the boy found him curled just as he is in a corner of the future Dead Heads, arms wrapped as tight as possible, forehead on knees. “Why?” He kept repeating, like a mantra; “Whywhywhy.”  _Why us? What did we ever do to anyone?_

“Maybe we robbed a bank or some bloody thing like that. Maybe this is some kind of bugged up prison.” Newt had responded, accent heavy and different from the rest of them. Foreign. Gally could put a name to it but knew he should be able to. It grated on him.

That casual tone took Gally by surprise, and he lifted his face enough to see Newt staring blankly into the trees.  _He looks so young_ , Gally thought.  _I wonder what I look like …_

“You think we're criminals?”

“I don't know what I think,” he murmured. Gally almost saw something in his eyes, a flash of the fear he felt in every cell of his body, but then it went away. “I mean,” Newt continued, “that's one explanation.”

He turned to Gally, expression open and eyes trusting. “So, I robbed a bank. What did you do?”

Gally's mouth gaped, unsure how to answer. He didn’t feel like a criminal. He didn’t feel like much of anything, really.

Newt hums. “You look smart. Maybe … Maybe you were. Some kind of … spy?” He makes a face. “Is that even a real thing? I don't know.”

Gally felt his hand float up to his face, fingers tracing the ghost of something no longer there. His fingertips tingled.

Newt's looking at him, “It's okay that you're scared. All of us are scared. I'm fucking terrified, alright. But, I mean. There has to be a way out, right? Of course, there is. C'mon, man! Let’s go scavenge those boxes for a bit to eat.”

Now, Gally sighs and grips the sheets. The worst part was watching that enthusiasm and hope slowly dissipate over time, as the knowledge that they were well and truly stuck in some place with five million walls sunk in deeper every day. The Grievers were the final straw.

He never joked about a prison ever again, didn't need to. It was their reality.

The tears don't stop until the sun rises.

 

 


	3. Chapter 3

 

 

It is two weeks before the temperature drops enough for people to be able to move back into their homes without the threat of roasting in their sleep.

Like the flip of a switch civilization kicks back into gear. Frypan and Amy launch themselves into the crops, not entirely metaphorically, harvesting and stocking and planting like mad. Gally is pretty sure Ira is sleeping at the garage, never seeing him without grease stains and a tool belt. Clint gives people (Thomas) lectures on self-care while Gally, Frypan and Minho stand to the side trying to conceal their smirks at Thomas’s rushed nodding and Clint's no-nonsense expression.

“Yes. Uh-huh. Of course. Not, not at all.”

“I’m being serious.”

“I understand completely.”

Clint is not convinced.

Minho re-staples himself to his best friend, and Beth shows up at odd hours of the day and continues conversations Gally was not aware of beginning. Minho gives him small grins from across the square that makes the back of his neck tickle.

Slowly, slowly.

(Minho knocks on his door with moonshine and no sleeves, eyes and grin full of suggestion. They don't make it to the bed that first time.)

 

 

Gally winces when Minho makes a noise into his shoulder, throaty and tense, gripping too tight. His arms almost strain.

 _“Shit,”_ Minho hisses.

“Y'okay?”

_“Yyyep.”_

Gally sighs, resting his forehead against the soft skin where Minho's neck meets his shoulder, and drops down onto his elbows more comfortably, palms flat on the mattress. It has been a while since Mother Nature would let any kind of consummation happen between them (along with a few other altercations, no one but themselves could hold responsibility to this) aside from desperate rutting and clumsy hands behind cabins.

And Minho is an impatient little shit.

Deep breathes, he shifts his knees forward to allow Minho to rest his weight on his upper thighs, biting down a groan. The nitwit doesn't miss a thing, as usual.

“Are  _you_  okay?” The smirk in his voice is blood boiling.

 _“Fine,”_ Gally growls.

Because he knows Minho is uncomfortable and in pain, but he also told Gally to “hurry the shuck up” so it's his own fault, really. Because all he wants to do right now is hike his legs up fuck him until he's arching and shouting, but.

But he  _really_  doesn't want to hurt him. At all.

Hence; deep breathes.

When Minho starts to sigh into his shoulder in a not-completely-pained way, he focuses on pressing soft kisses along the length of his neck and jaw, making Minho sigh more. His hips twitch forward on their own accord, and Minho hums in surprise.

“Hmm. You still feel good.”

Gally looks at him weirdly. “And that would have changed over a couple weeks?”

Minho shrugs slightly. “Yeah. You'd get sloppy without me keeping you in gear.”

Gally huffs a laugh and without thinking presses his lips to Minho's forehead, pecking a small kiss in between his eyebrows. He almost doesn't freeze and it almost isn't awkward until Minho moans at the gesture, his hips shifting down on Gally's lap in a way that forces a strangled noise from his throat, and oh, okay.

It is only at times like these that Gally could see his face properly, not hidden by a veil of sarcasm and hair. The bushy eyebrows, the two faint little freckles he has over the left one, the near-invisible scar through the right. The endearingly reddening cheeks and swollen lips, dark dark dark eyes, warmth, sucking him in and taking his soul, mind, body – everything.

Heart.

( _Shuck._ )

“You can move.” Silence. “Gal.”

Gally blinks.

“What?”

Minho looks amused, but only for a moment. He bites down on his lip and shifts again, causing electricity to shoot up Gally's spine. “I'm good now, c'mon.”

Experimentally, he shifts backward a fraction and then forward again a millisecond later. Minho's eyes flutter shut and he does it again, further, slower and with more purpose. A hum and a curse follows.

He feels … electric. Like every inch of him is charged, and too much, and his palms prickle as he grips on to Minho's hips and moves faster, the places where their skin touch feel like fire. He shifts higher on to his knees, dragging Minho with him, who cries out in response, head lulling back, eyes half-closed and unfocused on the ceiling. He kisses him anywhere he can reach, many times, dumb to the sounds ripping themselves from his throat, nearly drunk on Minho's quick panting and loud moans.

It gets too much, too fast, and nonsense words are flying in the air, he knows, and he must have done something good because all of a sudden Minho  _convulses_ , arms flying out to grasp at the sheets, head back and mouth open. It lasts just over a second, then everything goes limp all at once. With a shaky sob, he collapses onto the bed, flushed and panting and blissed out, and Gally loses his sight for a few seconds.

“ _Shuck._ ” Minho signs, once they've had the chance to come down, voice rough, “Holy shucking …” He laughs and it trembles just like the rest of him.

Gally sighs into the cool pillow where he had collapsed, boneless, beside him.

“Dude.” Minho begins, mouth loose and sleepy. (Gally still can't understand Minho's ability to casually call him dude after they've just had sex, but whatever.) “ _Shit.”_ He really is shaking. “Okay, so that was ... amazing.”

The sheer amazement in his wispy voice trickles warm, embarrassing sparks all the way down to Gally's toes. He turns his face in amongst pillows and sheets. Minho laughs at him.

Gally frowns, “The shuck are you laughing at?”

Minho shakes his head, cackling. “Nah, nothing.”

If he had more energy he'd lift up, but instead, he settles for just lying there, glaring.

“What?”

“Just you.”

“ _What?_ ”

“You shucking love it when I say how good it was. Maybe I won't next time, just to keep you on your toes ...”

Gally's eyes narrow. “Excuse me?” He pushes up on an elbow. “Who gets off on  _affection,_  you shank.”

Minho raises an eyebrow and scoffs, turns around to reach for the lamp on the bedside table. The setting sun coats the room in a dim indigo light, and it catches every dip and soft, muscled curve on Minho's body. Gally reaches out, arms snaking around his waist to slowly pull him close; his back against Gally's chest. He presses a gentle, lingering kiss on his shoulder blade while hands idly trace the soft skin and hair on his lower abdomen. The shiver that ghosts through Minho's body are not concealable, as well as the steadily rising flutter on the other's heartbeat against his chest. Gally smirks and lays a palm firmly on Minho's stomach, feels the muscles jumping, and noses at his neck.

“Hm. You like that?” He places a kiss just under his ear. Minho shivers again. Gally hears his breath hitch. He thinks he likes him trapped and helpless, it's really not a bad look. “Yeaaah, you do. You  _really_  do.”

He can almost hear Minho rolling his eyes, “Ugh. Slim it ...” His voice is weak.

Gally smirks and moves one hand to his hip while the other slides up into Minho's hair, fingers curling around the dark locks in a firm grip, thumb rhythmically tracing circles into his scalp. Minho moans.  Gally can picture his eyes fluttering shut and his lips parting, elated.

“What if I took you like this, huh?” He whispers, makes sure Minho can feel his lips moving against his skin. “Turned you over and fucked you slow?” he pronounces this with a roll of his hips. A half-strangled noise protrudes from Minho's throat, and his own hips jut back in response, “Soft? So that it lasts for so long your whole body feels like bursting,” – Gally pushes him over so that his hips are perfectly flat on the bed, knees on either side – “and this is all you can feel.”

His hands massage Minho's shoulders while he groans and whines, “You'd love that, huh?”

He thinks Minho tries to laugh, but it comes out too much like a whimper. Somehow he finds his voice to say, “Yeah, and you'd love hearing about how much I love it.”

Gally frowns. Damn. He has him there. Nevertheless –

“Last chance.” He leans all the way up so that only their thighs are touching, and Minho complains in the form of whining and shuffling around. Gally uses only his fingertips to trace an agonizingly slow line down to his lower back, stopping right at the end of his spine. Minho shivers and grips the pillow. “What do we say?”

“What?” Minho hisses, though Gally figures he knows exactly what.

“C'mon.” Gally's palms kneed into his ass, and he all but melts.

He shudders, whispering muffled by pillows. Gally pretends he doesn't hear and asks, “Sorry, what was that?”

“ _Hhngh_ _,_ ” Minho responds, and then, “Please.”

“Yes?”

A groan. “ _Shuck_ , Gally, please. I need you,  _pleasepleaseplease_.”

Gally decides to have mercy on him (and to himself, to be completely honest) and grips his hips in warning before sliding in easily. He swears, lets his forehead drop onto Minho's back. He expected him to tense, but instead, he does the exact opposite – moaning long and low into the pillow, and Gally can't help but kiss him, rocking slowly.

He is losing himself a little more every time they do this, he knows, but he doesn't really care anymore, listening to Minho all but chanting his name over and over like that. It's gotten so dark Gally almost can't see him, can only just feel him, hear him, and that is probably a thousand times worse. Minho keeps trying to lift up on to his knees but Gally pins his hips down and his legs together with a firm hand on his back.  _Not yet_. He shifts around, listening for when Minho's breath hitches and he moans the loudest, and holds that position, slows down considerably, and Minho  _sobs_  underneath him. 

“Oh, God.  _Ohgodohgodohgod_. Yes.  _Yes_ , please, please,” Minho rambles, with a few choice curses in and between the gaps. He grips the pillow so hard it looks like it could rip in two. At the point where Gally can't take it anymore, he slips his hand under his hip and lifts, leans over horizontal to Minho, thrusting with the entirety of his body, mouthing at his ear.

Minho's voice hitches with every thrust, moans raising higher and becoming breathier as he gets closer, “ _Ah._  Like that – yes. You're amazing. Fffuck!”

The curse catches him off guard, and Gally gasps when he clenches around him, coming only a second after. They don't stop until they're both dizzy and too, too sensitive, and the effects of the moment is gone and the world is suddenly too hot. Half-asleep and completely wrecked, Minho doesn't let him get more than a few inches away. Gally lies in between worlds, curled around him, tracing the long pattern of scars along Minho's back.

He drifts off to sleep sounder than he ever has, smelling damp pine and hearing ocean waves.  

 

 

Gally slams the bathroom door shut. Except not really. There is a Minho in the next room, after all.

“Shuck,” He whispers. And then again, and again. He tells it to the sink, to the shower, at his disgruntled reflection in the mirror. Cheeks still flushed, lips bruised and bitten, red mark under his jaw he's going to have to convince people (Beth) is a shaving burn (unlikely). Dark purple bruises here and there and everywhere. Hazel eyes glare back at him, wide and slightly afraid, and another face flashes before him. Only for a moment, though, but it's enough. Long, blonde hair and eyes a perfect copy of his, a woman.

Her voice says,  _“Idiot.”_

“ _Shuck_ ,” he says again.

Rusting sounds from the other side of the door. Gally half wishes Minho will just leave, while the other half crumbles up at the thought. If he weren't a coward he would tell him to go, himself. If he weren't a coward he would say –

His stomach roars. Loudly. The rustling stops. He nearly swears again.

Gally holds his breath. He only has pants on, but that's okay. His main exit is currently obscured by the biggest obstacle he is trying to avoid, but that's okay, too. The bathroom has a window. There is a sound further into the house. 

Okay, he decides.  _Okay._

He secures the top button of his jeans, grimacing at the unpleasant scrape of fabric against still sensitive bare skin, and turns to the window. It's about the size of a small oven, but whatever – he's crawled through tighter spaces than this. Carefully –  _carefully_  – sliding the latch open, Gally grasps the window pane with one hand while lifting his foot onto the basin, and pulling. His shimmy through the bathroom window is much less than graceful, but he's sunk this low already, so who cares. The dying leaves jab at his feet.

Frypan's is probably the best option, but his house is too far into the main square, and there is absolutely no way that he is galloping in there looking how he does if there is even the slightest chance he'll run into Amy at this time of evening. Gally sighs and runs left.

He doesn't stop to see Ira's expression before barging into his home (actually avoids eye contact altogether) though, the startled and concerned “What the  _fuck,_  Gally?” is all he needs. Gally grabs a bread roll out of the cupboard and attacks it, refusing to answer any of his questions. He can't even begin to imagine what Ira must be thinking, though he can – shirtless and shoeless and covered in marks, and probably smelling like it just to add the cherry on top.

He holds up a hand when Ira opens his mouth again, “Please, just. Just don't say anything for a minute. Okay?”

Ira squints at him, incredibly. “I would if you didn't look like you're about to freaking pass out, man, what the hell is going on?”

“There's someone in my house,” Gally mumbles, hating his voice. He sounds five.

This shuts Ira up for a second. “Um. Okay …” Gally takes a deep breath and opens the fridge. “Is, uh. Is this person friendly?”

Gally arches an eyebrow, “Probably not right now.” He grabs a half-eaten jar of peanut butter and closes the door.

“So you know them?”

“Yes, Ira,” he sighs. Then, reluctantly, “I slept with him.”

Ira grabs his arm, spinning Gally around to look at him. “You're with someone? ‘Him’ ...” Ira's eyes go distant, and Gally knows he is scanning the database of every male he's seen Gally even talk to. Eventually, his eyes refocus on a particular scar on his forearm, and he knows he may have honed in on one in particular. Gally groans and shrugs out of his grasp.

“No.” He says. “Not really. I don't know!” He snaps when Ira looks at him dubiously and immediately feels bad. “Sorry.”

He drops into a chair with the peanut butter. A minute later Ira places a bottle of something in front of him, he doesn't stop to check what, but it's fizzy and warm. “It's okay.”

“No, it's not,” Gally replies without hesitance. “I'm a shucking slinthead.”

“Well. Um. I still don't know what that means, exactly, but I'm sure it's not true.”

Gally shakes his head. But it is. He left. Ran.  _Out a window_. He'd ( _God_ ) made love, of all things, with Minho and then freaked out about it afterwards. And now he is here, in Ira's kitchen, while Minho is rustling around his, if he is even still there. By now he's probably realized that Gally is M.I.A and is –

“Hey!” Footsteps and a familiar feminine voice shouts from the front, “So I just saw Arms storm out from Gally's place and he looked extremely pi –”

Beth falls short upon the sight of Ira furiously making a sweeping hand gesture by his neck, and Gally, beer bottle in one hand a jar in the other, looking pathetic.

“Oh.” She says, eyes filling with pity and disappointment, “Oh, baby.” 

Gally lets his head thump on the table, laugh somewhat hysterical.

 

 

“The hell?” Frypan asks. Just that. The spatula in his hand looks more lethal than any weapon he's ever seen him wield. Gally mentally prepares himself.

“Excuse me?” He sounds.

Frypan is blocking his exit, and Gally would really rather not try the Tupperware. He has a headache. He slept maybe four hours this morning, and most of it was with his head in Beth's lap. And he is angry – at himself mostly, but also just irritable in general. He doesn't need Frypan to give him what he's already giving to himself.

“You wanna tell me why Minho's up there trying to strangle the corn?”

Gally flinches. “How should I shucking know?” He tries to keep his voice blasé but knows Frypan isn't buying one bit of it.

His eyes narrow, jaw set, “Right. Why don't I just ask your neck instead.”

Gally's hand immediately shoots up to obscure the marks on said neck, and fights the urge to slap himself. Frypan hums, “Mm hmm.”

Then, “How long?”

“What?”

“How long has  _this –”_  he waves his hand lazily up and down Gally's body, “been going on?”

Gally shrinks. “A couple months, maybe –”  _Smack!_  “Oow!” He shrieks, clutching at the forming bump on his head where the spatula had assaulted. “Shuck, Fry! Wh –”

“No,” The cook holds up the Tupperware threateningly, “Shuck you, Gally. I'm.” He throws his hands up, “I'm done. I am so shucking sick of you, and him and. And both of you!” Gally flinches again. “Y'all are two of the most stubborn shanks I have ever met.”

“And you've met a lot, have you.”

Frypan's knuckles pale. Gally bites his lip.

“He” - Frypan jabs his finger somewhat in the direction of the crops - “tries to murder our food supply, and you –”  _don’t say it_  “– go all post-Changing.”

 _There it is_.

His body goes numb, vision blurs for a moment. Frypan’s lip quivers, eyes guilty. It lasts for half a second before his expression dissolves into stony detachment.

“How dare you,” Gally whispers, low and furious.

Frypan keeps his face blank and unfeeling, “It's true. And I'm not dealing with this anymore. I  _can't_  if you refuse to –” He stops. Closes his eyes. Shaking his head, Frypan sidesteps around Gally, “I care about you, man, okay? A hell of a lot. And you need to realize that and stop being a shit.” He sighs, “Shuck. Whatever, who cares. I have a lot of work to do. See ya around.”

The back of Gally's eyes prickle near painfully, and fists clench at his thighs, nails digging.  _Don't cry_.  _Don't cry don't cry don't cry. This is all your shucking fault anyway, you stupid –_

Anger suddenly boils in his gut and he thinks about taking that spatula and –

Okay. Okay, so Frypan may have a bit of a point.

_Don't cry. Stop crying. You're always shucking crying. It's your own fault if you're lonely._

Okay.

He needs to get to the fields, and find Minho, and. And do what? Talk to him, maybe. Apologize first, and then project all of his worries and insecurities unto him and try and come out alive with at least some of, well, not his dignity, that's too far gone. But something.

Some shred of hope for the relationship he is terrified of having. (Of ruining). 

Minho is too easy to spot. He in knelt over in the cornfield, hair a black hole in the blinding horizon of green and blue and yellow. The wind blows the abused corn stalks everywhere. He takes a deep breath. Now or never. Thinking up icebreakers on the walk over is fruitless when he finally reaches Minho's position and immediately forgets all of them.

Minho pauses his mutilations when Gally's shadow passes over him. Shoulders tensing, he rolls back on his heels, body pivoting, jaw set and ready to shout, “ _listen_ , klunk for brains!” but sees Gally towering awkwardly behind him. Gally's mouth goes dry.

Minho's eyes do not lose any of their fire, and his jaw most certainly does not relax. “What the hell do you want.” He says it like a statement. Like,  _Go away._

“I –” Gally's voice croaks. He clears his throat and tries again, “Can we talk?”

Minho's eyes narrow and he presses his lips, turning away, “I've got nothing to say to you.”

“Well,” He runs a hand through his hair, “I have things to say.”

“I don't care.”

“Minho –”

“I'm busy.”

“Can you just.  _Please_  –”

“NO!”

Gally jumps, as do some nearby Munies. Minho launches up with the roar, spinning to face Gally. His eyes squint in the sunlight and he is sweating head to toe. Something spikes in the centre of Gally's chest painfully. “I don't want to listen to anything you have to say!” Minho glances around their feet briefly, probably looking for some large, sharp farming instrument to throw. He keeps his eyes low, not quite able to meet Gally's eye, and for a moment Gally considers something's off about him.

“And message shucking received, by the way,” Minho growls, finally. A cloud passes over his face, despite the burning sun, only for a moment before it's gone. He returns to murderous. “Do you know how shucking  _humiliating_  – No. No, of course you don't.” 

“You don't understand ...”  _What is it?_

Minho coughs a laugh. “Yeah. I think it's you who doesn't understand klunk.”

It's not the best thing to say, in hindsight – the best thing to do would just be to apologize, accept everything he deserves, and walk away. But Gally barely possesses any foresight, either, so:

“Is that one of my shirts?” Slips out of his mouth before his brain realizes he had spoken at all. Minho goes very still very suddenly, and under the harsh sky, flushes even more so.

A sound rises up from Gally's throat and bounces off his lips, and it could be a laugh, who knows, but it makes Minho actually start searching for something sharp and Gally immediately slaps a hand over his mouth, eyes wide. His shoulders still quake, though. Livid, Minho boulders past Gally down the hill, a trail of wheat exploding around him. A couple Munies sigh in relief in the corner of his eye. Shaking his head, Gally pulls himself together and runs after him.

As expected, a storm of profanities hit him when he gets within punching distance, and Gally temporarily holds back on reaching out to touch.

It would be amazing if he were able to swallow his laughter, but alas.

“You know, I only stole this thing to get it all sweaty and shit and throw it in your stupid, shuck face!” Minho is yelling, feet stomping and arms swinging, “Stop laughing! Asshole, I shucking hate you!” he stops and rounds to face Gally. They almost collide. “What the hell gives you the right to do that, huh?”

They're attracting a bit of attention now. Gally can see Frypan in his mind’s eye, giving him a look of  _If you klunk this up, so help me._

“Nothing. No, nothing does,” Gally says, honestly.

Minho runs a frustrated hand through his hair, sighing irritability, and Gally just wants to kiss him, if not for the very high possibility of having his teeth kicked in. Plus their public situation, which Gally personally could not give two shits about, but he isn't sure how Minho feels on the subject.

“God. If I was that damn appalling you had to shucking  _launch_  yourself out a window, you could have just said so.” Minho pauses, reconsiders, and says, “Actually no – I'm amazing and you can go fuck yourself.”

“Yeah, you are,” Gally says, stepping forward. Minho glares him down before he can get any closer. The toes of their shoes are inches apart. Gally bites his lip when Minho's expression slackens, turns questioning and confused. His arms crossed tightly against his chest, the usual threatening and defensive gesture turn vulnerable.

Gally wants to just tell him everything. So, so much. Wants to strip all of these stupid barriers they still keep against each other to bricks, to tell Minho that he makes him too happy, and it terrifies him because he doesn't remember what being happy for long periods of time even felt like – if he'd ever known it to begin with. That he's better when he's fucking things up, that everything he's ever owned ends up broken on the floor eventually, that it's easier that way.

He wants to say “Some mornings I wake up and the sheets smell like you and I feel like I want to explode.”

Instead, he says, “I'm sorry,” low and broken. Minho looks startled. “I don't ...”

His throat constricts on the last syllable but Minho's eyes are knowing. He gets it. Minho sees everything and Gally is so stupid.

“And you think I do?” Minho asks, voice equally as low. Gally shrugs. “You're such an idiot.”

“I know.” Gally sighs, chest fluttering with relief.

“Good.” 

“I really am sorry.”

Minho nods, eyes understanding. He says, “I have to get back to work,” with purpose, while Gally stares back stupidly – he raises an eyebrow at Gally's stiff stance, afraid to step forward. Minho rolls his eyes and leans close to press his mouth to Gally's, lingering with just the right amount of pressure to make his toes tingle, and when he steps back his expression reads  _happy?_

_God._

“Don't think I'm not still mad. 'Cos I am. I might still punch you.”

Gally internally flinches, “I'll make it up to you. Promise.”

“Yeah, you will,” More purpose. Some of the Munies whose attention they’ve caught, eye them strangely. Gally blissfully ignores them. 

He goes home to change before heading to the garage, feeling light and airy. He can’t seem to stop licking his lips. His home is an odd thing – so quiet and still, some days Gally feels like if he breathes he'll disturb the ghosts that sleep here. Then there is the sun, always streaming in in diagonal beams, highlighting dust particles that swim in the air. He thinks about who had lived here before the world ended. Wonders what kind of worries they had, if any. 

He walks straight into his room without thinking and is far from prepared for the sight that greets him.

The bed.

The bed, which is not a post-carnal mess like he assumed, but is actually made up. Made up well, neat and trimmed and wrinkled just so, just in a way that shouldn’t have  _Minho_  written all over it but it fucking  _does_.

And everything is switched.

Numb, Gally reaches out to trace the pillows at the foot of the bed, lets his fingers ghost over the upturned cotton over the blanket, tracing a faint line all the way to where they disappear before the headboard.

His knife rests on the small table beside it.

Gally feels laughter bubbling in his chest again, warmth spreading to his feet, vision blurring. Wave upon wave is crashing into him, more every day, and they all from hiss to scream Minho's name.

He's in love, he's so in love, and he's losing his mind.

 

 

“Why  _do_  you sleep like this?” Minho asks him as they lie in the backwards bed, lips moving softly against Gally's skin, “You never answered my question.”

Gally shrugs, fingertips tracing the long line of Minho's back, feeling every small bump of his spine. He breathes in and smells pine. “Dunno. It's … better. More comfortable.”

Minho just nods, accepting this as it is. Sleep threatens to take Gally any moment, the mattress feeling like water beneath him. He hears seagulls in the far distance.

Gally finds the long spider webs permanently embedded into Minho's skin. He dares to drum a beat against it.

“You never answered this question, either.”

Minho hums noncommittally, “Lightning storm from The Scorch.”

He holds him a little tighter.

“Wear my clothes more often.”

Minho's lips stretch into a smile, and he links their ankles together. He does wear his clothes the next day, all day, out and proud for the whole god damn world to see, and Gally goes absolutely fucking crazy.

 

 

People have started to decorate pumpkins, of all things. Frypan, of course, yells at them for it, and they call him cruel. Minho yells back at them even louder, calling  _them dumb shucks who’re wasting good resources for no shucking reason!_  (Later, Frypan hands over the smaller ones that didn’t grow right to kids with puppy eyes, who clutch them to their chests and run off happily. Minho and Thomas take turns stealing the larger ones. All three act innocent when confronted.) Holes are cut out of old sheets and pointy hats are made out of old boxes, and for a night Munies light a fire and drum on pots and pans from the kitchen, and everyone forgets the whole world just for a little while.

Amy finds an entire barrel of sunflower seeds in one of the latest warehouses they manage to finally break open, and her glee is remarkable. She happily ignores Frypan acting as a second shadow, telling her that planting all of those seeds is a bad idea, as she and an armada of Munies (and a couple Gladers and Group B girls who try to hide from the betrayed cook in vain) plants all of those seeds. Within weeks Paradise is infested with bright, proud black and yellow flowers nearly taller than Gally is himself. Sunflower fields run for nearly half a mile next to the crop fields.

Frypan pretends to be bitter but Gally sees straight through him.

“Sunflowers represent love and longevity. Did you know that?” Amy tells him one day. They’re sitting cross-legged in the field, Gally watching her as she trims and prunes a whole cluster of them laying in a circle, her at their centre. A smaller Sun. “Adoration, loyalty …” She lists. “My grandmother would plant some in our front garden every year on the first day of spring, and then when they sprouted we’d pick them. The entire house would just  _glow_.”

She looks up then, and Gally has really never noticed how pretty she is before, soft hair mirroring the colour of the flowers themselves, blowing delicately across lightly freckled cheeks. He sees now why Frypan is so enamoured.

“It was the reason I wanted to be a florist growing up until I discovered the culinary arts.” She laughs, once, and then quietens for a moment.

“I never thought I’d be saying this out loud, but I – I kind of like it here?” She looks at Gally, green eyes filled with honesty. “I mean, I like its enclosure. I like the – the safety that it alludes to. I think that, over time, we could be happy and safe here.” She says. “I just want everyone to be safe …”

Together they tie three sunflowers to the front of every house in the village. Frypan watches them dubiously and goes beet red when Gally remarks, “Relax, I’m not gonna steal your girl.”

Amy chuckles.

Gally fastens the last flower, smirking, “Even though I am way better looking than you.”

This makes Frypan scoff, “In your dreams, shank.”

Gally sees Thomas sitting on the roof of his house one afternoon while the sun is setting. He looks strange and absorbing, staring out over the sunflower field, and, Gally realizes, the closest to Zen he has ever witnessed him. The saturated pinks and oranges bounce off his skin and clothes and hair, and he is so still he nearly doesn’t look real.

 _He may be on to something_ , Gally thinks as he climbs on to his own roof the next evening. You can see  _everything_. The village, the fields that go on forever, the forests that surround them, the lake. Light fills the entire world until it is everything that it is and ever was, and Gally forgets about before.

He can also see the road.

 

 

The weather doesn’t change much, but it gets cold enough for Minho to start stealing his favourite jacket all the time. It’s fine, though. He takes pleasure in seeing how the very faded outline of angel wings move against Minho’s back. (He found it at a camp somewhere in ‘Cisco just after The Right Arm took him in. He hated the motif, haunting him of lives lost and stolen, yet he kept it as a reminder of everything he did and didn’t do. Until memories of broken bones and blurred vision and hospital sounds and smells assaulted him for the first time, a man’s adoring, shaky voice whispering, “You must have a guardian angel watching over you, buddy.” The ghost of a hand trailing through his hair. He didn’t sleep for a week after that.)

 

 

They see Frypan’s Beast on a Wednesday night.

Gally lies awake, eyes fixed in a blank gaze on the ceiling, counting cracks, listening to Minho’s quiet snores and steady breathing. He is curled around him like a living blanket, arms and legs locked a bit too tight, maybe, but Gally enjoys the warmth and proximity – marginally content.

There were more memories. Water and seagulls. How surprising. He is starting to become sick of it, wishing his brain would conjure up something new – real or not – just for a bit of variation, for once.

(That’s a lie. There is a boy, sometimes, neat and tidy with his top button done up to his Adam's apple, eyes bright and smiling at Gally, then, eyes blank and staring at nothing, not neat and tidy, and soaked.)

Gally is partly contemplating trailing kisses down Minho’s back until he wakes up, or getting a glass of water, or jumping into the lake, or all three when three heavy beats thump against the side of the house. He ignores it at first, blaming it on fatigue until the sound appears two more times, then three, then four, then there is a giant shadow passing dubiously by the bedroom window. His heart skips a beat, body stilling and suddenly very awake. For a moment there is only silence apart from Gally’s hammering heart and Minho’s soft breathing, and then a puff of air and a low, unnatural whine so loud that Minho stirs, groaning.

Gally immediately clamps a hand over his mouth.

Minho frowns, bleary and confused, blinking sleep from his eyes. He makes a noise and Gally shushes him, all nerves on edge. His free hand moves toward the knife like a magnet. Minho sees the twitch at once, eyes filling with alarmed concern.

“What – what?”

Gally shushes him again, listening out for any sounds of movement. Gripping Minho’s shoulder and looming over his body, as loud as he dares, Gally whispers, “There’s something outside.”

Minho’s eyes grow even rounder, flitting between Gally and everywhere else, then back. “Some _thing?_ Outside?”

There is a crash, the sound of a thing with great mass throwing its entire weight against a solid object, wood splitting.

Well. Not outside anymore. The bookshelf sitting harmlessly in Gally’s living room crashes to the floor. Minho and Gally’s eyes scream at each other. It, whatever  _it_  is, is in the house. Gally wastes no time in lunging for the knife. Balanced in his hand, nothing has ever felt more useless and pitiful. They throw on whatever is clothing shaped and closest and tiptoe to the door, ears straining.

The crash next sounds like the couch is thrown against the wall.

Gally takes a moment, closing his eyes, focusing on the sensation of the cool wall against his arm, and the anchoring warmth of Minho against the other.  _It’s okay._  He tells himself.  _It’s not a Griever. Just some wild animal. Everything is fine._   _Breathe_.

He’s not sure who grasped whose hand, but suddenly their fingers are linked, palms prickly with sweat.

“Ready?” Minho whispers, freehand bracing the door. His jaw is set, but there is a barely concealed terror behind his eyes. What sounds like an entire row of cabinetry falls to the ground. Gally grips the knife. He nods once. Minho cautiously pushes the door open into the dark hallway. There is no time whatsoever for them to allow their eyes to adjust, as they creep down the hall, willing the boards not to creek.

All of his senses feel heightened, adrenaline pumping through his veins, the sole objective at the moment being Live To See Tomorrow.

Minho grasps his sleeve, “Waitwaitwait!”

Gally stops immediately, limbs turning to stone. With chilling dread, he realizes, “It’s in the hall.”

Minho mouths a curse or three and begins leading Gally the rest of the way down the hall, walking slow, Gally loops two fingers into Minho’s waistband and doesn’t breathe.

“Living room,” Minho instructs. Making a sharp turn, they see it then. Larger than he could have imagined, a horrible lump of deformity with bulbous legs, the moonlight catching its antlers. They stop – they shouldn’t, but they stop – petrified with both horror and awe. Gally stares, unable to help it. He’s seen enough abnormal nightmare creatures to last him a lifetime, but the thing looks like it can barely stand straight, legs buckling every few seconds causing it to whine and jump up with much resistance. He feels pity creep into his chest.

Then Minho is tugging at him urgently, trying to get to the door, which of course is when the floorboard creeks and everything stops. The creature huffs once, twice, there is that horrible gurgling and Minho’s nails dig into his shoulder.

“Gally,” he mouths first, before louder, “Gally.  _Gally!_ ”  

The thing’s hooves slip and scrape against the floor, a giant shoulder chips the wall and glass breaks somewhere behind them, and it charges. Minho swears, gasping Gally’s shirt and lunging toward the door. He is saying something, probably “Shuck!” And “Run!” and “Gally!” but the thing is moving toward them and Gally locks eyes with it.

He doesn’t think. In a second the knife is clutched firmly in his fist and the next he is rearing back, aiming, and the blade is somersaulting through the air. With a sickening squelching noise, the beast lurches back, the shadow of it crashing into the counters. Gally turns and pushes a stunned Minho out the door before his internal autopilot disables. Feet pounding and heart pounding faster, Gally scarcely notices the dry grass and twigs digging into his bare feet as they run all to way to Minho’s house, not stopping until they have a solid door behind them. Gally falls against the wall, breathing hard, chest burning, watching Minho some distance away in a similar state.

“Shit,” he gasps, standing up straight to begin pacing the room, “ _Oh,_ my god.” It’s like this for a while, Minho pacing, breathing heavily.

“Minho,” Gally gasps, attempts to shove against the wall but doesn’t get far, holds an arm out instead, “Minho, hey.”

Minho spins suddenly, marches toward Gally in three long strides and grasps the front of his shirt, jerking him toward him.

“What was that?” He growls, “Huh! The hell were you thinking? One more second and we woulda been dead!”

“Minho –” He tries.

“You do not – !” Minho’s voice wavers, fists tightening in Gally’s shirt, “When I tell you to run you shucking run, do you hear me? Not in a second,  _right shucking then!_ ” he shouts, “Shit, Gally! Shit shit shit shit …” Minho trails off, breathing heavy and shallow. Gally pulls him the rest of the way toward him, shaky hands trailing hips and ribs to wrap securely around his waist, soothes his cheek and nose against Minho’s, feeling long eyelashes brush against his cheekbone, feels him melt against him, fists loosening. 

He’s not sure how long they stand there like that, but eventually, Thomas emerges with bed hair and only one eye open.

“What is goin’ on?” He mumbles, shuffling into the room, finally getting a good look at them – their half-dressed and ashen-faced state – and immediately wakes up.

“Tell me what happened,” he demands.

They tell him.

Thomas’s face turns blank, the same way it does whenever he is about to do something very idiotic. “Lock the door behind me.” Is all he says, and is out the door before either of them can react.

“ _Are_  you serious!” Minho groans before chasing after his best friend.

Gally most certainly does  _not_  lock the door behind them but stays planted against it, hand on the knob and ears straining, starting at any sound, before quiet knocking and a hushed “Gal!” emits from the other side. Thomas and Minho shuffle through the threshold, Minho looking stony and holding on to him tight.

“It’s quiet out there.” Thomas comments. “Too dark to see any trails, though. We’ll check in the morning.”

“We should warn everyone,” Gally adds, feeling dizzy, coming down from the adrenaline.

“What, and cause a panic? No,” Minho says, words muffled as he bites unconsciously on a nail.

“He’s right,” Thomas nods, running a hand through his hair, taking a deep breath. “We need to be cautious, though. I’ll keep watch.”

They watch him walk to an armchair near the window, scooping up a thick spiral bound book with loose pages sticking out in each direction along the way. Minho regards him hesitantly, “You sure?”

Thomas nods, waving a hand, “You’ve been through enough tonight. Go. Sleep.”

They’re doing that thing again where they have full conversations in mere seconds, and only with their eyes. Gally stands awkwardly to the side. 

Finally, Minho mumbles a soft, “Okay, Greenie,” and turns and gestures for Gally to follow him. “Wake us up in two hours!”

Thomas makes a noncommittal noise and opens his book. 

 

 

Minho’s bed is soft and cool and it’s no surprise to either of them when Gally wakes up to Minho slapping his feet out of his face, mumbling something like “sleep like a normal shuck”. Though his early morning bad mood might have more to do with the fact that it is morning – light streaming through and birds chirping – and Thomas absolutely did not wake them in two hours.

“It wasn’t without trying, believe me,” Thomas says, brewing coffee whilst Minho attempts to set his hair on fire with his eyes alone. “I gave up. Thought I’d just let you sleep.”

“And how hard did you try?”

“Not very.” He hands them two mugs, sipping from his own. Gally sees him, all sheepish smirk and dark circles, finally understanding why Minho is always irritated. He sips from his cup, his brain beginning to wake up and remember why his hands are trembling, sweat prickling above his eyebrow. Thomas goes off to find to find Frypan, leaving the two of them in anxious silence.

Gally’s house is in pure, undefined shambles. The carpet is ripped up, holes in the walls. What little furniture he did have is torn apart, photos of the people who used to live here years and years ago lie broken on the floor, their happy faces covered in a spider web of glass. In the middle of it is the corpse of a stag twice the size nature intended, with Gally’s knife sticking out of its eye (it makes a terrible sound when he takes it out). They stare at the scene in morbid silence. The poor animal, bent and dire with its mouth slack and tongue handing out, Gally wonders if they should cover it with a sheet.

Eventually, Frypan says, “You know … I was kind of hoping I’d imagined the whole thing ...”

Minho closes his eyes. After a moment, he says, “We need to get rid of it.”

They grab as many people as they can while still keeping the whole thing on the down-low. Burying the carcass is probably the easiest option; venturing farther into the trees than Gally has ever been, though Minho and Thomas seem to know exactly where they’re going, leading the way. A long piece of rope and one of Gally’s bed sheets are tied unceremoniously around the animal, they manoeuvr (see:  _drag_ ) it through the forest as best they can until finally reaching a point far enough away from the village that they’re content with. Burying it takes longer than they anticipated – digging the hole and rolling it in before it can start to smell too bad. 

He sticks close to Minho on the trek back, maybe too close, who knows, but by the lethargic way everyone seems to be trudging through the woods, no one notices how they lean into each other like magnets. He sees broken plants building a path for them on the way back, and the long stick in Minho’s hand and feels himself grinning.

Later, with eyes closed, focusing on breathing and the sound of the water hitting skin, hitting the glass in one long  _hiss,_  running over his back, and Minho’s fingers in his scalp as he washes the dirt out of their hair and off their skin. The image of the beast is still fresh in his mind, the sounds it made still echo through his ears.

He says, “Minho.”

“No,” Minho murmurs, scrubbing suds off his neck, using Gally to steady himself.

Gally sighs, “But – ”

“No, Gally. Okay.” He whacks his forehead, “Stop that.”

 _But. So deformed. How much radiation had the deer been exposed to?_ How much radiation have  _they_  been exposed to? Reading his mind, Minho says, “There’s chemicals and shit left over from the War, yeah, but that thing must have been around for ages to have ended up like that, the poor shank. So. Stop thinking about it.”

He doesn’t ask how Minho possibly knows this, the same way he doesn’t question how he knows the exact date the War started and ended, along with where, with not one clue how. And, well, Minho has a point. He highly doubts they’d be sent to a lush paradise to only die of radiation poisoning one year later.

Gally sighs, dropping his head onto Minho’s shoulder, just feeling the warmth of him while tracing two fingers up and down the length of his spine, over the slightly raised marks on his back, “Make me stop thinking about it.” He feels the laugh catch in Minho’s throat.

“You romantic, you.”

For the next ten minutes, Gally is held tightly and kissed completely breathless. It’s funny, but it is now that he notices Minho’s mouth only reaches his chin. It was only months ago they lined up perfectly, and years and years before that Minho would tower over him. How much can change. They stand there until the heat of the water cools and the front door opening and shutting sounds through the house. They dry off and dress, Gally rubbing a towel in Minho’s hair until it’s frizzy, and Thomas politely averts his eyes when the re-enter, flushed and water-smelling.

 

 

Gally has never seen less of Thomas now that he is actually living with him. A feeling of guilt creeps in at first until Minho reassures him that it really isn’t him at all, that he does this all the time, “He hates being shut in. He’ll just kinda … leave. Even in the middle of the night.”

He also pretends not to notice this growing tension between Minho and Thomas that no one seems keen on acknowledging, especially Minho and Thomas. It’s not exactly resentful; but is this growing sentiment, this thing left to simmer in a pot until it eventually boils over. Even Frypan’s picked up on the long, drawn-out silences in the place of usual bickering, the stiff press of Minho’s mouth and tight jaw whenever Thomas enters a room with either the dark circles under his eyes the same as they were the day before, or worse, as well as Thomas’s well-practiced obliviousness.

Minho snaps on a Wednesday, which Gally has the glorious luck to witness.

“Okay,” he spits randomly after breakfast, “This needs to stop.” The air turns cold quickly, and Gally groans into his coffee. Thomas looks up from where he is pouring cereal into a bowl.

“Stop what?” He asks, frowning. “If you want the last of the shucking cornflakes, Min –”

“No.” Minho cuts in, tone acidic, “ _this_  needs to stop.” He waves a hand up and down at Thomas. “You. Everything. Get some damn sleep or I swear, Greenie, will drag you by your by your ears to Clint and get him to sedate you, don’t think I won’t do that.”

Gally coughs, once, “Minho.”

Thomas holds Minho’s eyes, slowly putting down the milk and turning, leaning against the counter. He folds his arms around himself, stance almost defensive. They look like a pair of volcanoes ready to erupt, which Gally wants to be very,  _very_  far away from.

“I can’t. Okay?” Thomas speaks slowly, voice lower than Gally’s heard in a long time. It settles wrong in his stomach. “I can’t sleep, Minho – You don’t understand. I close my eyes and I see things I never want to think about again.”

“And you think I don’t! You think my life was all shucking cherries and roses before The Glade – No! Sit down, I need a witness!” Minho orders. He doesn’t see Thomas raise an eyebrow. Gally stays put, uncomfortable.

“It sucked,” Minho concludes.

Thomas groans. “I’m not saying that, not at all. I  _know_  – but you. You don’t –” He stutters, hand gripping the counter so hard his knuckles are white, and the other grips his hair in frustration. “Why do you think I didn’t want any of my memories back? Eleven years!” He shouts, abnormally loud in the small room. “I was in that place for  _eleven years_ , Minho, and you have no idea what it was like. WICKED owned me.  _Owned me_. I was their puppet, their god damn show pony – name it.”

His voice cuts off agonizingly, arms winding around his middle. Minho’s jaw unclenches. “Me, Aris, Rachel – Teresa …” He takes a deep breath and Gally stifles a flinch. “Looking back, maybe getting all my memories in one punch would have been less painful than slowly finding out the many ways I’ve been screwed over the years.”

“Thomas –”

When Minho steps forward Thomas shrinks impossibly further back against the counter, “No, don’t touch me. Don’t come near me, just. Just don’t.” He almost begs, “Please.”

Gally feels numb, unable to move from where he sits, palms pressed to the table top. He sees something unravel in Thomas then, when he looks up at them, sees Minho loyally keeping his distance. He closes his eyes, just for a moment, and reopens them. Taking a deep breath he steps out of the kitchen and toward the door.

“Where’re you going?” Minho asks, startled.

“Uh. Clint,” Thomas says, but he doesn’t meet either of their eyes, “Maybe you were right.”

Thomas returns with a bottle of sleeping pills, some vitamins and supplements, another bottle he doesn’t mention, and probably a lecture or four. He sleeps through two sunsets.

 

 

The first chill of the season arrives almost a month later. It’s is now cold enough that Gally needs to wear his jacket to work every day – both in the garage and in Munies houses, elbow deep in the piping system – if the annoying loudmouth he is sleeping with both literally and metaphorically doesn’t steal it first. Said loudmouth shows up while Gally is replacing the alternator on the Station Wagon he helped nurse back to health, stomping up all pouty and annoyed in a baggy hoody one size too big, which sparks warmth in Gally’s chest. He hides his smile behind the hood. 

“Dude,” Minho growls, plonking down on the car and making it wobble, “I am going to kill someone.”

Gally barely looks up, “Don’t do that.”

The ex-Runner groans into his hands, “I’m serious! I am losing my shucking  _mind,_  I –” Minho notices Ira from across the room, innocently taking apart a fan belt while whistling to himself, and actually makes an effort to lower his voice, “I can’t stand them. Every one of those shucking Munies, they’re all idiots.”

Gally shoots him a mock glare, “Don’t be racist.”

Minho narrows his eyes, “Maybe I’ll start with you.”

Gally wipes his hands on a dirty rag, “You won’t have anyone to fuck.” He narrowly dodges the kick Minho swings at him. He snickers, leans forward and nips at Minho’s ear a little harder than called for before he can stop him. Gally takes a seat beside him, Minho steals the towel and dips his finger in the fresh oil. “What, though?” He asks.

“I’m just. I’m going insane.” Minho lifts his finger toward Gally’s face.

Gally muses, “Fair enough. You wanna get out of here?”

Minho groans appreciatively. “God, yeah.”

“No, I mean, like. Out of here.” Minho’s hand pauses on the little swirl he is drawing on Gally’s upper lip. “Out of Pa _-radise_.” He chokes on the word like it tastes bad on his tongue, “Just for a bit.”

Minho pulls his hand away, slowly. It’s a little shaky, and Gally is sure he hadn’t imagined that.

“Gally …”

“I mean we can. We have transport.” He cocks his head at the red Wagon they’re sitting on, “And I’m not talking going to the Grand Canyon or anything. We’d need a boat for that …” He looks at Minho, who looks nervous. “If you want.”

“Where?”

“Um.” Gally eyes him for a second, “Just down the coast, or something. The beach?”

“The beach,” Minho echoes, calming down from whatever  _that_  was, “Okay. Yeah, actually, that sounds great.” 

“Okay.” Gally keeps his voice casual, deciding to drop it for now, “Today?”

“Yes,” Minho sighs, finishing the last swirl.

Gally smirks, “Are you going back to work?”

“Hell no. Didn’t ya hear my declaration of murder before, I thought I was clear?”

Gally holds his palms up, “Okay, okay. Are you gonna kiss me?”

Minho laughs “Nope. You have grease on your face, man, that’s disgusting.” He makes it all of a few strides out the door before Gally has him by the waist and is smearing grease over his cheek, Minho whining and squirming to get away, accidentally rubbing up against him a little too much. Gally lets him go before he has to take an early lunch break. Ira is smirking at him when he gets back.

“What are you looking at?” Not the grease beard on his face, surely not.

Ira shakes his head, still smiling, and hands him a clean towel, “Happiness suits you.”

 

 

They leave before three o’clock, grabbing whatever essentials they deem necessary – he feels guilty taking some food out of storage when Frypan walks in, considers him for a moment before saying “I never saw you here.” and immediately leaving. Gally deeply appreciates the sentiment.

Gally tells Thomas, “If we’re not back in over a week you should probably send help.” who gives him a pained expression in return. The sunset bathes the world around them in deep orange; pinks and purples catch on the leaves of trees they drive past. Minho rummages around for a CD to slip into the player, to test if it works (they’ve been sitting in a draw for the entire year. “They’re ancient, like this car.” Minho snides) while Gally snips at him to stop moving and put his damn seatbelt on. Finally, he settles on one with four solemn-looking men in sepia on the cover, slipping it into the player carefully.

First nothing, then static, then a horrible screeching noise that makes them both clutch their ears, then music. The first line sang is a mumbled something about a “garden of eden”, and Minho immediately punches the eject button.

They chat and argue about nothing whatsoever, Minho with his seat reclined back and feet up on the dash, eyebrows raised sardonically and mouth quirked, ready to jump on whatever Gally decides to say next. The rest of the drive is in this same peaceful state until the road ahead forks off to the right, suddenly. Gally slows when they approach an old faded sign, the actual sign portion of it fallen off and leaning against its post. Two directions are written, though only one is just barely visible, both of them in bold Russian. Gally makes a move to keep driving straight, and Minho clamps a hand down to where he is poised on the navigator.

“Don’t.” His eyes are wide and serious, and Gally decides maybe he really doesn’t want to know.

 

 

The city centre peers at them from a far distance, both spectacular and menacing, while they drive around the outskirts. He stops in an abandoned lot right by the beach, the water like one giant natural mirror reflecting the sunrise. Nearly a mile of soft, flat sand stretches out in front of them, and endlessly beyond. Local landmarks and probably once perfectly manicured lots of grass and trees trim the edge of it, now all broken and forgotten, overgrown and burnt. Above all St Petersburg is empty. So vastly, completely empty Gally finds it hard to imagine the place infested with people everywhere. He can’t decide yet if he finds the quietness of it beautiful, or daunting.

There are now faded signs in English coupling the Russian, maybe a high tourism area. Gally imagines coming here, back when people weren’t being chased down by monsters every second of the day. Another part of him, some sappy, pathetic side imagines him and Minho here together, dancing around other tourists, Minho in a thick winter jacket, in a time where  _winter_   _actually_   _meant winter_ , cheeks and nose red from the crisp air, snapping photos like Americans, laughing at nothing and everything.

Minho is asleep next to him, with his knees pulled up on the seat, body pivoted toward Gally, lips partly open and breathing softly, and hair nearly obscuring one eye. Gally sighs and leans back, lifting one knee comfortably.

 _In another life._ He’ll make do with this one.

Shadows pass over his eyebrow and cheek in a funny way and Gally lifts a hand to trace it lightly, which makes Minho whine and scrunch up his nose, “Hey.” He only whispers it but it wakes Minho up immediately.

“Hm?” He hums, started, “Wha –?”

“Easy.” Gally shushes him, “Look.”

And Minho does, brushing hair out of his eyes and staring out over the water in awe. “Whoa …” he breathes, expression open and honest. His mouth parts in a small little smile he probably doesn’t even know he’s making, and Gally is suddenly hit with an image of a younger Minho, his expression far less open but eyes still as honest as nothing before. It’s a small rooftop they’re standing on, as far as rooftops go. It’s more like a balcony, really.

There’s a boy standing on the edge, leant against the railing, staring at the sunrise, that stupid dome obscuring it and dulling the colours. “Minho,” he says his name is, pronounces it carefully, like he hasn’t taken the training wheels off it yet, offering Gally a hand.

The memory fades back to reality, and Gally realizes he’s been watching the entire sunrise on his face.

And now Minho is looking at him, too, a kind of coy smile Gally has never witnessed before slowly stretching on his face.

“It’s so quiet,” Minho whispers.

“It is,” Gally whispers back. There is no wind and the waves gently roll onto shore, quiet, quiet, quiet. The world has just stopped, and here they are sitting in a rusty old car at dawn.

“Why are you whispering?” Minho asks, voice not even raising an octave.

“Why are  _you_  whispering?”

He just shrugs.

They both agree that they’re hungry, and Gally takes the pleasure of sitting back and watching Minho’s ass in the mirror as he rummages around for a snack, leaning over the back seat. They eat and recharge, staying put until they find they’re game enough to actually step foot outside, getting distracted along the way, and a little  _more_  distracted after that. There are no birds, no wildlife, no nothing, and it should be creepy and off-putting, but it isn’t. What Gally thinks, as Minho fucks him slowly into the back seat, is that they’re the only ones left in the entire world.

“Okay,” Gally mouths into Minho’s jaw, feeling their synced heartbeats begin to slow to a normal speed, “I think I’m ready.”

“Hmm?” Minho moans in response, still on top of him and very much naked.

Gally pokes his hip. “To go outside. You?”

Minho just breathes for a moment, eyelashes tickling his cheek, and nods, “’Guess ...”

Well, that settles that. Gally reaches up and behind him to pull the latch on the door, swinging it open. The air that greets them is too cool for their flushed and oversensitive skin, but Gally ignores it despite Minho apparently not being able to, swearing and jumping up. Now free, Gally lifts his body and climbs out, Minho staring at him like he’s insane.

Well, there is a little bit of wind, but it’s not  _that_  cold, really. “You comin’?”

Minho gapes at him, trying to locate his pants, “What – now?”

Gally nods, the wind blows a strand of hair in his mouth. “Yeah!” He huffs, pulling it out. The air kisses his skin and he feels exposed, vulnerable, and exhilarated all the same. Was it only an hour ago he was afraid of being attacked?

Minho is still blinking at him, but. They stare at each other, stark naked, making no move to cover up.

“Come on,” Gally gently encourages, stepping back while containing eye contact, mouth quirking to the side in playful challenge, “I’ll race you.”

“You’re unbelievable.”

“There’s no one here, Minho,” He says, rounding the vehicle. “Just you –” one foot touches sand “– and me.

“Gally!” Minho’s exasperated shout emits from the back seat, where he can no longer see. Minho groans something which sounds like, “ _you insufferable shit_ ”.

Gally cups his hands around his mouth, and in the most ridiculous rendition of what some of the people in his hometown spoke like, shouts, “Please vacate the vehicle! I repeat –  _please vacate the vee-hicle!_ ”

“Will you shut up already?”

“This is your CAPTAIN SPEAKING –”

“Oh my god!” Minho climbs out the car, looking embarrassed and long-suffering, “You’re actually a loser, okay?”

Before he can get any closer, Gally turns and bolts down the beach, feet pounding on the sand, kicking up a trail. Behind him is a shout of outrage followed by the hissing of sand as Minho runs to catch up. Which he does not, Gally muses smugly, when he reaches the edge of the water far before him. The waves curl and foam at his feet, between his toes, licking at his ankles, and for a second he allows himself to close his eyes, breathe in the salty sea air, until Minho finally stampedes into the waves and crashes into Gally’s back, arms locking around his waist and spinning him.

“Hey!  _Hey!_ ” Gally cries out.

“Jerk,” Minho scoffs when he finally sets him down. Gally curses and shoves, to which Minho frowns and shoves back. Gally kicks water at him. Minho shrieks because, “It’s shucking cold, damn it!” and this goes on for some time until they are both dripping wet and collapsed on the warm, hardened sand, trying to catch their breath. The sun is warm enough to dry them quickly, though it isn’t scorching, maybe deciding to give them a break for once in its life. Minho is idly tracing his hand over the hundreds of freckles on Gally’s skin, mouth moving softly as if he’s counting.

“Hey,” Minho’s voice breaks through the sound of the waves, and Gally peeks one eye open, “Kiss me.”

He raises an eyebrow, turning on his side to face him. Minho’s eyes are unguarded and inviting, squinting slightly against the sun, and Gally leans forward to press their lips together. When he pulls away Minho says, “Thanks.”

“What was that for?”

“San Francisco.”

A beat. “What?”

He smirks, slipping a leg between Gally’s and entwining their ankles. “Where I was born. Where I lived before … My first-grade teacher’s name was Mrs. De Paolo. The girl across the street was Lydia.” He pauses for a second, biting his lip in thought. Eventually, he says, quietly, “I had a sister. She was a professional model. I always told her everyone was nuts and that she was too ugly.” He chuckles, “She was beautiful.”

Gally listens without saying a word, hand placed firmly on Minho’s forearm, waiting for him to continue. And he does. And he says, “I don’t actually know what happened to her. Or my parents. WICKED took me ages before that. I was …” he pauses to think. “Twelve.”

Gally takes a moment, waits for the cloudiness in Minho’s eyes to clear, before asking, “What was her name?”

Minho’s lips curve into a smile that doesn’t quite reach his eyes. “Sun,” he murmurs, “Her name was Sun.”

Gally says, “Adalind. My mother.”

They decide to take a walk down the beach (with clothes) staring at the scenery before them, but have to turn around and walk back when Minho gets too jittery.  He’ll maybe ask, one day. Not now. Though it might have something to do with the fact that it’s been months and they haven’t attempted another scouting trip. Maybe ...

Later, they’re lying on the mattress they shoved in the back of the Wagon, Gally with his head pillowed on Minho’s lap, the latter idly playing with his hair. Then Minho says, “It’s my birthday today,” quite out of nowhere.

Gally blinks at him in surprise, attempting to sit up, “What? Really?” Minho holds his shoulder down, nodding, “How old are you?”

“Uh. Eighteen, probably. Yeah.”

Gally smiles, “Happy birthday, then,” and Minho flicks his nose in appreciation.

They play a game which Minho buoyantly dubs “Memory Roulette” where the objective is to ask the other as many random and personal questions as they can, and whatever they can’t answer they sacrifice an item of clothing. Gally rolls his eyes and just goes with it, doesn’t try and correct the noun. This goes on until the sun has set and Gally is in nothing but his boxers, and Minho his socks. They talk, sleep, do neither of the two – repeat.

The next day they explore a little further inland, both in the car and on foot. Gally chooses an open field to show Minho how to operate a car, and an hour later he is trying to repress the bitter jealousy at how quickly he is picking it up.

“This is fun.” Minho muses after yet another perfect turn.

Gally side-eyes him, not unkindly. “Yeah, well, there are no obstacles so …”

“Uh huh.” Minho laughs, “How many times did you nearly kill garage boy?”

Gally shifts in his seat, “No comment – Eyes on the road, loser.”

They decide to stop by a little string of shops styled like an old village, which mostly sell trinkets and clothing. Gally takes a shirt with a bad word on it in bubbly Russian letters (or, rather, he likes to imagine that’s what it is) while Minho snags one in plain English that reads  _ **It’s The End Of The World As We Know**_ ** _It_**  because he is horrible, and a loose tank that says  _ **SEXIEST**_ because, “The shirts don’t lie, Gally, they’re like prophetic or something, I dunno, I can’t explain it.”

The trinket store is stocked top to bottom with glass and crystal carved into animals and landmarks and everything in between. He takes a little glass pyramid for Ira, knowing that it will probably make him cry but he’ll deal with that when it comes, and a flower made out of blue crystal for Beth, knowing that she’ll laugh at him (it’ll go quite nicely with the jacket he found to match her  _sharp_  personality). Minho grabs a couple blank notebooks for Thomas.

 

 

The sky is pink and orange with a dusting of fluffy clouds that reminds Gally distinctly of younger years, of carnivals and cotton candy, rides, music, and clutching at his father’s sleeve, his mother’s dress. If he closes his eyes he can hear it, just faintly in the distance. A simpler time, before Sun Flairs and destruction. He wonders what his dad would think of him now, of everything, watching him lain next to a beautiful boy with a bright smile on the roof of a car, passing a protein bar between them like a cigarette. Would he be proud of the things he’s done and disprove of others? What would he say to him, now?

(What would Gally say to  _him_ , if he could?)

( _I miss you so much_.)

“Do you think …” Gally speaks before he realizes he speaks, soft a cautious, “Do you think it’ll stay like this forever? The world.”

Minho takes one more bite before answering, “Not forever. A shucking long time? Yeah, maybe.” He passes it to Gally, who takes the last bite. He does not throw the empty wrapper on the ground. “Jorge said the disease is dying out, but as slow as Hell. The percentage of people being born and diagnosed as immune is higher now than it was a decade ago … It’ll happen. Someday.”

“Someday …” Gally murmurs. Someday kids can play outside without the threat of being stolen away or having their limbs ripped off. Someday WICKED might rule the world. He’s happy he won’t be alive for that day.

The sky is now magenta. Gally’s mind does a quick map of the geography, and he asks, “How long do you think it’d take to get to Italy from here?”

Minho groans.

Gally continues, “Mn, maybe Italy’s a stretch. Ukraine? Y’know –” he turns on his side to face Minho, who’s looking like the essence of exasperation “– Russia shares a border with over a dozen countries. There’s –”

“Uh huh, yes.”

“ – Norway, Finland, Poland, erm …”

“Yes, okay, Gally.”

“China,” He says potently, nudging Minho in the hip.

He receives a flat glare in return, “I said I’m Korean.”

“We can get to that from there.” Minho groans again. “Seriously, name a city.”

He rolls on his side, too, waits a beat and says, “Vienna.”

“Name a city we can get to  _by car_.”

Minho sighs, burying his face in Gally’s collarbone. “I don’t  _know_  where we can get to from here. Not without, like, a map. I’m not shuckin’ mystic.”

 _Oh_. Is Gally the only one that can list cities and their exact locations off the top of his head?  _This is for later_ he tells himself, files them away in his Thoughts Before Sleep section of his brain and does some back peddling. “Finland. Maybe Helsinki isn’t klunk this time of year.”

“ _Every where’s_  klunk  _all_  times of the year.”

Well. Can’t argue with that.

“Do you think Moscow has a stable government?” He’s just talking aloud at this point, “Why is here such a wasteland? What happened …?”

Minho meets his eye. For a second the light catches his features and he looks sheepish, and then it’s gone. “Ah, yeah. It does. And I really don’t know.”

Gally stares at him trying to comprehend the first part of that statement, “Do. Do they know we’re here?”

“No one knows we’re here.” The “ _except_ ” is so loud in subtext it’s nearly deafening. Some sort of look must have passed over Gally’s face because Minho immediately says, “Gas’ll run out before we’re even a quarter of the way there.”

 _…_ Convenient.

“Hey,” Minho nudges his leg with a knee, “Find a way to get me to Vienna, I’ll get you to Venice one day.”

Gally doesn’t say  _deal_ , or even ask how he knows it was Venice. He just smiles. “You think – if we ever do find a Berg – they’ll try and go home?” 

Minho snorts and flops on his back, “What’s home?”

Gally mirrors him, slowly. If it were, say, the middle of the night, and he was loose-lipped and reckless, Gally might have said something dumb like  _you’re my home_  or  _I love you_.

He stays quiet and bites the inside of his cheek.

 

 

It is a bad idea. A very bad one, he knows this, but the word “Moscow” has attached itself to the forefront of his brain with a nail gun, and pliers are not accessible. They’ve been here five days so far and Minho hasn’t said anything, barely even asked when they were heading back, as they sleep in old houses and swim naked in the just-too-cold water and have sex on the beach. For some reason, Gally waits until he has his face pressed into a pillow, and Minho has set himself with the task of biting a string of hickeys down the length of Gally’s back, to ask, “Moscow?”

Because apparently, that’s all his brain will allow.

Minho halts his actions suddenly, growing still above him. Gally peeks up at him from under hair and white cotton. Minho looks long-suffering.

“Please …”

Something happens then. A string, one that Gally was unaware of being pulled tighter and tighter from the moment they left – from the garage even – until right this moment, snaps. He flips around, managing to nearly knock Minho off the bed. He catches himself quickly, his mouth set in that familiar  _mad_. Gally feels a laugh bubble in his chest, two parts hysterical.

“Okay, seriously?” He says, sitting up, “What is with you?”

“Nothing’s  _with me_.” Minho’s voice has a bite to it. Gally is oddly unaffected.

“Really? Because you’ve been weird since we got here.” Minho scoffs at this, attempts to get up. Gally grabs his wrist, “No. Why won’t you tell me what the shuck is going on?”

“With what?” He says, strategically calm.

Gally eyes him, “With you. With everything.”

He could feel Minho’s pulse fluctuate under his palm. His eyes are darkened. “Fine. What do you want?”

Gally frowns, “I want you to talk to me!”

“I don’t want to talk to you!” Minho shouts, ripping his arm out of Gally’s fist. He shifts so far down the end of the bed he may as well have wound up on the floor. Gally can’t help the deep-seeded hurt from entering his bloodstream, even though some part of him expected this, honestly. Deep down. He can’t keep his eyes from finding the discarded shirt, the one they found with the bubbly letters, the same one Minho had peeled from his torso only ten or fifteen minutes ago. His gaze lingers a moment too long, and Minho follows it and curses.

“No.  _No_ , that’s not what I meant, I –”

Gally’s already stopped listening, getting to his feet.

“Wait. Gally, just –”

“I’m leaving tomorrow,” He says, lowly, sweeping up his shirt, and shuts himself in another bedroom.

 

 

The night comes and goes without him managing to sleep a wink. Gally lies on pink sheets and stares at a bunny clock stuck at 10:23:56. The light streaming in through the window breaks him out of his current trance. The sound of glass breaking down the hall helps, too. He finds Minho standing in the middle of another child’s bedroom clutching at his palm and swearing, a broken picture frame at his feet and a bottle of wine tipped sideways, the alcohol seeping into the carpet. His back is to the door so he doesn’t notice Gally leaning against the frame, watching him until he turns. Minho has circles under his eyes, which are watery and bloodshot, his face ashen. Gally can hazard a guess he doesn’t look any different.

With a hoarse throat, he asks, “You drunk?”

Minho replies, “No.”

“Good.” Gally nods to his hand, “Why are you bleeding, then?”

“The damn frame slipped and … glass ricocheted and … yeah.” Minho finally glances up at Gally’s face, “You’re still here.”

Gally raises an eyebrow, slowly. “You really think I’d leave you stranded?”

Minho laughs one humourless laugh, “Honestly, I have no idea.”

Gally scoffs, “That’s a real nice image you have of me. What were you even doing in here?”

“I don’t know. Being morbid, I guess. Thinking about how everyone who lived in this house is dead now.”

“Nice.” They look at everything but each other for a minute or two until Gally asks, “Are we gonna talk about this or not?”

Minho has pulled a small blue shirt out of the dresser and presses it to his palm. “What?”

Gally groans internally, “You. You need to stop pushing me away.”

This finally makes him look up, astonishment written on his face, “Me? Push  _you_  away?”

“Right. Now, see – the difference here is that I’m aware that I do it.” Gally takes a deep breath and rubs an eye with his fist, tired, “Please stop lying to me. It’s  _me_ , Minho.”

Minho blinks at him. “I have never lied to you,” he says sternly.

“Well, you haven’t exactly told me the truth, either.”

“I’m sorry,” Minho’s voice is quiet and just a hairline fracture from broken. It’s bad that Gally wants to see him collapse, just because he’s angry. He hates himself for it. The soft blue of the T-shirt is now clouded with red.

Gally digs his nails into his thigh, preparing himself for what comes next.

“If you don’t see this working – this. You and me – say it now. And we’ll stop.”

Minho freezes and the room goes cold. His breath is shaky. Gally forces himself to stay put, grips the doorframe to makes sure. He can see it, too – the two of them sleeping in their own beds, their own homes, going back to politely nodding to each other in passing, “good morning”s and “how are you”s. He can see it plainly.

He doesn’t want to.

Finally, Minho sounds guilty when he says, “I can’t do that.”

Gally releases the door frame, “Me neither.” Minho sits down on the bed, unsteady and trying to hide it. Gally says, “But this needs to be different. I know something is happening here that you don’t wanna say, but you can’t – You can’t keep things like this from me. Both of you. From the others, yeah, okay, that I can understand, but from  _me_ , Minho? From Fry, from Clint, Beth? All of us? I think after everything we’ve at least earned it.”

“I know that. I just,” Minho breaks off, “I didn’t want to think about it myself. I didn’t want to  _think_  – Do you know what I’d give to just be. Be oblivious.”

The tone of Minho’s voice is a low, tearful whisper. He looks up, and Minho is wiping at his face, body swaying a bit, and okay, he is a little drunk, clearly. Gally is feeling buzzed just of the fumes alone.

“I’m sorry, Gally.”

He regards him for a moment, considering, and then, “Tell me.”

 

 

And he does: “There is a wall surrounding us. Paradise. It goes on for miles. I don’t know how high it is – pretty damn high, I guess. It’s a two-day drive from here, at least.”

Gally stares. For about a minute. During this time Minho stands and sits back down twice, begins pacing the room.

“How can you possibly know that.”

Minho doesn’t meet his eye when he says, “The people in the city told us.”

The corner of Gally’s vision begins to blur.

Oh.

Okay then.

“The what?”

Minho speaks like it physically pains him, “The people that live in the city. They told us that a few years back it started being built. And that they had no idea why, until we showed up.”

He feels faint. “Thomas said you guys didn’t find anything. Or any _one_.”

“We lied.”

“Why?”

“Because –” Minho rounds on him suddenly, “We couldn’t tell anyone. Because then they’d wanna go communicate, and you don’t –” He takes a deep breath, “They’re not good people, Gally. They’re bad. Really, really shucking bad.”

Gally bites his cheek almost enough to draw blood, “We’ve dealt with bad before.”

“No. Not like this.”

The cold dread in his voice makes Gally come forward into to room and pulls Minho down on the bed gently. “What happened?” he asks.

“Five of us nearly died, including Thomas. In fact, there was a point where I was convinced he was dead. He. I – Jesus shucking Christ.” Minho rakes a hand through his hair, and Gally can see him desperately fighting for control, “The only reason they let us leave is if we promised to never come back. Ever. They’re not Cranks, Gal. They’re just …”

“Human,” Gally concludes, grabbing the edge of the bed for balance, feeling nauseous.

“They want to be left alone, which, hey. That’s is just fine by me.” He looks up, “So, yeah. That’s all that.”

“Okay. Alright. That’s … that’s pretty shucking big.”

“I know … I know.”

They sit in silence for a bit, close but not touching. Something is still weighing on Gally, though. “What’s with the wall?”

Minho doesn’t answer right away. “It’s. It’s to protect us, mostly, according to Brenda and Jorge. We’re supposed to keep the human race going but … clean.” 

“Oh.”

Gally wipes his face. They’re here to play Adam and fucking Eve, of course they are. Well. Looks like WICKED counted a lot of unhatched chickens there. That explains a lot, actually.

The silence is loud, the waves the only indication that the world still exists outside. He’s almost scared of it, really. What will happen when they have to leave and go back to their “lives”? Especially now that he knows about the city people, the people that Minho  _and_  Thomas are both terrified of, while they try and just live day to day life with that knowledge. It’ll be in the back of his mind forever. He’s not sure he could do that to anyone, especially not his friends.

Suddenly Minho says, “My parents had the Flair. So did my sister. I didn’t get to watch them die but I got pretty damn close.” Their eyes meet. “I left that part out, but … there it is.”

Gally says, “A month after my dad died my mom sold me out to WICKED. They were doing a last ditch scout of the area for immune kids, and I was hiding.” He drops his gaze to the strained cloth around Minho’s hand. “The last thing she ever said to me is that I was going to save the world one day. The last thing I ever said to her is that she was already dead.”

He can feel Minho’s eyes on but he can’t look up.

“Stay here.”

About five minutes of scavenging around both upstairs and down Gally returns to a concerned looking Minho with bandages, a needle and thread, and rubbing alcohol. Minho sees them and goes even paler. Gally kneels down in front of him.

“Trust me?”

Clutching his injured hand to his chest Minho looks like he wants to refuse, before sighing and carefully giving Gally his palm. 

“I’m sorry about your family,” Gally says, carefully unwrapping the T-shirt and pressing clean tissues to the wound.

“I’m sorry about yours.”

There is absolutely no way to prepare him for the alcohol, or the stitches. Gally can hand it to him for keeping impressively still while hissing in pain, teeth clenched and eyes squeezed tightly shut, head turned away.

“Crap! Did I ever tell you I hate needles?”

Gally kisses his fingertips and reaches for the bandages.

 

 

They both agree that attempting the journey back with a night of absolutely zero sleep is very dumb, and stay one more night. They raid the liquor cabinet once more, doubting that the owners would mind that much. Gally makes a toast to them. They lounge lazily on the floor in the middle of the living room, Gally with his head pressed into the warm skin of Minho’s stomach, listening to his heartbeat in the silence, watching the gentle rise and fall of his chest.

“You know the main reason I was so angry at Thomas for shooting Newt?” Minho says. Gally doesn’t try and stop him, “Because I wouldn’t have done it. Wouldn’t’ve been able to. How dare that dumb shank still have enough courage left in ‘im to do that! How  _dare_  he put our friend out of his misery, when I would have just told him to shuck off. Told him no, I’m not doing that. Not to him.” Gally lifts his head up to see his face.

“And then that’s just it, isn’t it. That’s why he asked Tommy, and not me.”

Gally brushes the hair off his brow and kisses him until he stops sniffling.

“I might need you,” Minho whispers against his lips, “I mean – I kind of need you. A lot. Please don’t leave me.”

Gally promises. Minho promises in return.

 

 

They pull seventy per-cent of the living room’s possessions out onto the beach, arrange it into a pseudo pyramid and set it on fire. One small item tossed into the flames one by one is a person they’ve lost, all the way from now, to the Maze, and to before. They save four for the nameless family. It’s a terrible tribute, but it’s something, and it makes them both feel a little better about moving on.

They sleep on the beach that night by the warmth of the bonfire, tangled around each other. Gally watches the stars until he falls asleep.

 

 

 

The weather is nice, and the water isn’t as cold as yesterday. They catch each other’s glance. Maybe tomorrow.

 

 

Driving back to the village is peaceful. The sun casts organic shadows on the road that looks to stretch on forever, orange and greens and browns and gold. Gally casts chaste looks to Minho whenever he can, fooling himself into thinking he’s being subtle. Minho politely pretends not to notice, irately brushing phantom splotches of sand off his ankles and arms. He has to pull over half way because Minho insists on driving, and they get home before sunset, only almost crashing once.

They drive it up all the way to Minho and Thomas’s porch, where coincidentally he, Brenda, Aris and Jorge are sat idly chewing on sandwiches. Thomas seems to perk up as soon as he notices it’s them. Gally is touched. Minho expertly (i.e. doesn’t hit anything) parks the car, immediately sticking his head out the window like a dog and hollering, “Hey, Greenie!”

Thomas actually helps them unpack while the other three watch. Brenda shouts, “How was the honeymoon?” and Minho flips her off. She wags her eyebrows back at him.

Minho rounds the back to pull his mattress out of the car (which the four find  _fascinating_. Gally happily ignores them) when Thomas glances at a spot on his neck and smirks. Gally sees it immediately and touches his neck, and yep, sure enough.

He sighs, “Really?”

Minho doesn’t grace him with a glance, “It’s not my fault you bruise easy, you pasty shit.”

He leaves them to return the Station Wagon back to Ira’s garage, and present him with the souvenir. He doesn’t outright cry, but he does get teary, smiling and hugging Gally – which he isn’t prepared for, and awkwardly hugs back after a moment. Ira laughs at him. Beth is very appreciative of her new jacket. “You looked cold,” Gally tells her, playfully. She puts it on and instantly looks ten times more badass.

“Thanks, baby.”

 

 

“So how was it?”

“Terrible. It rained the whole time. I got bitten by a dog and Minho lost his right shoe.” Gally can never actually tell when Frypan gets a joke or not. Alternatively, Gally can never tell when he is making one or being dead serious. Their relationship is a lot of guessing most of the time, but hey, it works.

Right now Frypan rolls his eyes at him, whisking something. Probably cookie dough. Good. Gally is starving. A mix of protein bars, sex, chips and fights don’t really make for a good healthy diet.

“Recommend?” He asks, but the look in his eye says that he can already tell what the answer is going to be.

Gally considers telling him everything, right this second, but stops. The look on Frypan’s face says that he knows something is not quite right here, always known, just like Gally, just like all of them, but if Gally were, say, _unwilling to share_ , then that would be alright. Minho’s words play in the back of his mind; “ _Do you know what I’d give to just be oblivious?_ ”

“No,” Gally tells him, “not really.”

Barely nodding, Frypan continues with his baking. “Good that.”

 

 

Life continues, as it should – boring and calm. People are still on edge about the barely concealed animal attack, and it takes them almost a month after careful reassurances by a number of other people besides Minho and Thomas, to somewhat relax. Doors and windows are still being locked every night, though. Gally doesn’t find he minds this too much, the small spike of panic behind his ribcage still spurs whenever he imagines sleeping with a door or a window wide open. It’s subsided in a year, since Minho, but only just.

Baby steps.

The people are relaxing, too. The air is colder than it has been in a long time, some days enough to make Gally wish he had a scarf. They are forced to double up on clothing – double shirts, socks, and underwear (Minho forces him when he turns his nose up at the uncomfortable thought) – which means the number of Munies washing by the lake increases daily. Which also means more socialization. Gally is  _thrilled_. Bonfires are also becoming more of a thing, in the main part of the village, and people crowd around, sometimes well into the night. It’s all very fairytale. Not bad, though.

Gally finds another house on his own. Minho suggests the two of them shaking up, but Gally can tell he’s hesitant to leave Thomas on his own, not just yet, anyway. And hell if Thomas will ever admit that he isn’t ready to be alone, either. Gally prefers him stable. They try all three of them in one house for a bit, but sex with another set of ears just in the next room is difficult, and downright uncomfortable, despite Minho’s reassurances. He doesn’t miss the discomfited way Thomas doesn’t meet their eyes in the morning, the pink tinting his cheeks. And Minho calls  _Gally_  an exhibitionist, well.

They’re better with their own space.

(Sometimes Gally still feels like he can’t breathe, like the walls can close in, and he has to get out. Just sit in the woods for a while, focusing on his heartbeat, on his thoughts. They happen randomly, these episodes, and sometimes Minho is there. Sometimes he kisses his forehead, the tops of his eyelids, with a firm hand against his lower back; grounding, calming. A lot of the time it helps. And sometimes it doesn’t.

(On the other hand, some nights Gally wakes up to Minho shaking beside him over a dream.)

The dreams, also.

He dreams of his dad more often than he did before, but now it’s different. He remembers a time when he could still be lifted up in the air, when his mother could still smile genuinely, her hazel eyes serene, long hair looking like gold when it caught the light, which tickled his nose every time she’d bend down to tuck him into bed. He doesn’t resent her anymore, not like he used to. Now he understands how broken and desperate she was for even a sliver of hope after her world had turned grey. He can relate. Gally just wishes he knew what happened to her. 

 

 

The Munies have begun stringing crops and flowers that didn’t survive the harsh conditions to buildings in the square, and Minho nearly passes out with revulsion. Which. Yeah, okay, Gally can admit it’s a bit … very weird. And gothic, sickly brown and black create a canopy above their heads. It’s Christmas in a week, apparently, and the fuzzy memory Gally has of the tradition didn’t involve dead sunflowers, but hey. New traditions can be made.

They get an actual tree, at least.

Lights are strung and entwined with the flowers, ones that a Munie found in one of the last units they were yet to crack open. One that conveniently opened right before Christmas, holding pretty lights and bells. He and Thomas share a look, or many. Nobody else finds this strange. Or maybe they don’t care.

New Year’s is a more privet event with Gladers and Group B members only, give or take a few select Munies, in the usual cabin by the lake. Gally once again mixes a bucket full of moonshine with Frypan, with Amy sat up on the counter beside him, looking both horrified and impressed. Frypan’s hand barely detaches from her knee the entire time. Gally hides his grin.

That night he finds himself in the kitchen being pummeled with déjà vu. Thomas is talking about something – he’ll admit he’s not really listening – watching Minho laugh with Frypan and a few others in the main room. Beth is settled next to him, long hair touching almost her knees, and he watches as she drops her head comfortably onto Minho’s shoulder, shaking with laughter. Thomas sits opposite chuckling into his wrist, shoulder to shoulder with Aris and Ira. It’s nice seeing them both so comfortable around other people, remembering them being so detached once upon a time.

The déjà vu hits harder when Thomas excuses himself from the group to join him.

“Hey,” He greets, smiling.

“Hey,” Gally nods, sipping his drink.

Thomas settles against the counter, “Hiding?”

“No,” Gally says, “just … watching.”

They watch together for a minute before Thomas speaks again, “You know, he ran in after you. That night when the Grievers took you.” He smirks at Gally’s shocked expression, “At the time he said something about wanting to make sure where they went when they disappeared into the Maze, but … I saw when you, uh. Got stung that time.” Gally uses the pause in Thomas’s speech to break eye contact. He turns his glass around and around with his fingers. “Anyway, it was the same look on his face. He went to run in then, too, but Alby stopped him. It was, like. Lost.”

Gally is starring at the ground, and Thomas has to nudge him to get his attention.

“He really has it for you, man. Don’t ever doubt that.”

Gally hides his stupid grin in his drink, “I don’t.”

Sometime later, way later, when most of the people have either gone home or passed out somewhere in the house, when Gally has switched to water, Minho finds him, taking his hand and pulling him down the hall into one of the smaller bathrooms, snickering the whole time. Turns out he hasn’t switched to water. He’s on him as soon as the door shuts, pressing Gally into the sink and kissing the breath right out of him. He tastes like bad moonshine and sugar from the cookies Frypan made for the occasion.

Gally breaks away when his lungs begin to burn, letting his foreheads rest together. “Whoa, hey – easy, easy …”

Minho chuckles lightly, curling his fingers into Gally’s belt loops. “Miss you,” he moans, “Come back.”

Gally groans internally. “Everyone is here. In the next room.”

Minho sways forward and plants his face into the crook of Gally’s neck, “Yeah, so? Let’s make babies …”

He barks a laugh, a little too loud, wincing through uncontrollable snickering. “I dunno how your sex ed. worked, but mine said that’s not possible, sorry.” 

Minho kind of nuzzles his neck, sighing, “You’re warm. It’s cold out there.”

Gally ties his arms around his shoulders, resting them there, “You’re a little drunk.”

He makes a noise of protest, wriggling in his arms, “I’m not actually  _that_  drunk.”

“Uh huh.”

He feels him frown against his skin. “Really! I don’t, remember? Stopped a couple hours ago, I just lo –”

They both freeze. Minho squeezes his eyes shut and pulls back after a second, eyes flickering up to Gally’s face and away again.

“I, uh …” Minho begins, finger tapping anxiously against Gally’s hip, Gally’s chest fluttering. “Yeah, so, I …”

“I know,” Gally interrupts gently, pulling him in for a kiss and murmuring against his lips, “I know. Me too.”

They manage to snag a couch all to themselves and, still buzzing with post-orgasm giddiness, decide to throw caution to the wind and cuddle up together, arms and legs wound tight under a soft blanket. He dreams again, not of a memory to unlock, but realize. The final night after the Maze Trails concluded, as he lay helplessly floating in and out of consciousness, a voice talking to him. Hands tugging his shoulders, arms, legs that don’t quite work yet.

“Hey,” A voice is saying. “C’mon, get up, they’ll be here soon.”

The sensation of being dragged along the floor, “Okay, I can’t carry you. You need to stay with me, alright?”

A face, too blurry, above his own. Long hair …

“ _Pleeaasse_  wake up. They’re coming! Stop being such a baby and get up. You can do it …”

Sun is streaming in through the window when he comes to in the morning, white, cold light. It might be snowing, it’s impossible to tell. Gally feels elation in his chest at the thought. Nose pressed into Minho’s hair and blinking sleep out of his eyes, Gally scans the room until he finds Beth on the opposite couch, curled up and head resting against a combination of a pillow and Brenda’s hip, sleeping soundly and so, so beautiful.

 _Thank you,_ he thinks at her, somehow knowing she can hear it, despite the impossibility. Stranger things have happened.

Minho stirs after twenty minutes, rolling over in Gally’s arms to face him. “Oww,” he whines.

Gally snorts and kisses his temple, “Good morning.” He reaches into his hair and begins to massage his fingers slowly against his scalp.

“Don’t laugh, asshole.” He groans, “Morning.” 

They make out as quietly as they can (it’s mostly just Gally kissing and Minho letting himself be kissed, to avoid vertigo), leg hooked over a hip and wandering hands kept mostly innocent, until finally someone else wakes up, and thus commences the onslaught of wolf whistles, slightly awkward just-woken-up-and-hungover laughter and groans of “get a room!”.

Minho disapproves of the sudden noise, burying his face in Gally’s chest and pulling the blanket over his head. Gally grins and hides in his shoulder.

Life in Paradise isn’t perfect – far from it, actually. But it’s life. A life, for them. After everything, maybe a little bit of boring normalcy and domesticity is what they deserve, damn it. And they’re going to take advantage of it. And, okay, maybe they still don’t know how to live without looking over their shoulders. Maybe that will never truly go away, but it’s getting better. They go to sleep at night staring up at the stars, and hoping they will come back tomorrow.

 

 

*

 

 

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Find me on [tumblr](http://singt0me.tumblr.com/) here :)


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